Philip White
InDaily
September 21, 2017
“The 2017 Rieslings show the outstanding quality that flows from a mild vintage when warm days and cool nights allow even development and harvesting at optimum ripeness,” writes Sevenhill winemaker, Liz Heidenreich.
She goes on to echo what I suspected, and am beginning to hear from souls older than mine: this vintage was a lot more like it used to be “before the impact of changing climatic conditions pushed the first pick of harvest [forward] into early February”.
Liz picked this year’s whites in March and April.
After the brilliant O’Leary Walker ‘seventeens, and tasting other fresh babies around the barrels and tanks of these ranges, I can only say Liz is being typically modest: mercifully, in razor-sharp contrast to the northern hemisphere harvest underway right now, South Australia’s 2017 seems to be one of the great years of recent decades.
This blend of the fruit of four vineyards spread over lean slaty siltstone to rich ferruginous loam shows clearly the softening influence of the latter grounds, in which the vines have a much cushier life and produce more immediately gentle and approachable wines. Wrapped around the lean, bony fruit from the siltstone, this flesh makes what I call a Riesling for the drinker just graduating from Chardonnay.
It sports a creamy, almost lush texture, with 7.6 grams per litre of crisp, lemony, totally natural acid.
Following the typical Riesling citrus petals and pith of the bouquet, the flavours follow through gentle lime to lemon, making me wonder what the wine would be like with bubbles. At which point I bung some in the Soda King … yep: rock’n’roll.
Not to suggest that improves the wine: it simply helps with my theory that texturally and structurally this is very similar to good Champagne.
It’s tempting to make ‘well, in he goes’ jokes as this decorates one’s lucky gullet, but the wine is appropriately named after the Basque Inigo Lopez de Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits who established Clare’s first winery at Sevenhill in 1851.