Wirra Wirra The Holy Thirst Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz 2017

There is a bit of  story to this relatively new addition to the Wirra portfolio and it goes like this. Wirra Wirra’s Angelus Bell was sourced from a Jesuit church in Norwood, Adelaide, with ties to the Jesuit community that established Sevenhill in Clare. Despite the winery connection, the Norwood Jesuit community established a temperance society named The Society of the Holy Thirst and the Sacred Agony. The team at Wirra just couldn’t resist.

This is a very small production wine made for cellar door customers and was the result of a late-night conversation about Church Block and cabernet shiraz blends. Blending bench trials of combining parcels destined for RSW and The Angelus yielded some exciting results and the first wine was released from the 2016 vintage. Only 110 dozen were produced in 2017.

It’s from Wirra Wirra’s oldest, low yielding vineyards with the fruit hand-picked, crushed into open fermenters with a combination of hand plunging and gentle pump overs, before basket pressing. After 19 months in French oak, of which 30% were new, the best five barrels were chosen for the final blend. It shows how good this classically Australian combo works, especially in McLaren Vale, where the plump fleshy fruit comes together so beautifully. Dark fruits of blackcurrant and plum with a lick of chocolate and lifted cedar. There is power, depth and poise here in a wine that has plenty of ageing potential. Worth dropping into the cellar to check it out.

Ray Jordan

Wine critic, author and journalist at Winepilot

Ray Jordan has been writing about wine for more than 40 years. His first articles were published in the early issues of national wine magazine Winestate in the late 1970s when he worked in Sydney as a newspaper correspondent. From 1989 Ray wrote more than 3000 columns as a regular newspaper wine columnist. He currently writes a regular column for the special business publication Business News and is one of the main contributors to national wine platform Wine Pilot. In 2017 Ray co-authored The Way it Was – A History of The Early Days of the Margaret River Wine Industry and previously wrote Wine in the Blood: Australia’s Family Wine Estates, published in Mandarin and English. In 2011 Ray was awarded WA Wine Press Club Jack Mann Memorial Medal for his contribution to the WA wine industry. His love of wine is as strong as his love of the blues and tasting the thousands of wines that cross his bench each year allows him to indulge in both.

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