CELLAR DOOR
Cellar Door open 7 days a week, 11am - 4pm. Bookings strongly recommended. Give us a call (08) 7324 5301 or email cellardoor@tapanappa.com.au
Stonefruit, honeydew and lemon zest, cut fennel, with spicy cedar oak in support. Medium bodied, tangy lemony acidity, almond and spice, firm and flinty finish. It’s a wine of structure and coiled up power. Good now, but ideally needs a couple of years to slot into its groove, I’d say.
93+ Points
2015 Tiers Vineyard 1.5m Chardonnay
A new member of the Tapanappa chardonnay family, from the 2003 Tiers plantings at 1.5m spacing, producing an earlier ripening, softer and more generous style. The result is delightfully fragrant, packed with white peach and lemon fruit of impressive concentration, defining a well-rounded and juicy palate, yet beautifully honed with finely mineral acidity and finely structured mouth feel.
94 points.
2015 Piccadilly Valley Chardonnay
Striking an exacting balance between complexity and depth tang and refreshing elegance, this is a chardonnay that sings the virtues of vineyards around the Piccadilly Valley in fragrant white peach and lemon tones. It's tangy, persistent, finely- textured and delicious.
94 points
2013 Whalebone Vineyard Cabernet Shiraz
A very refined, fruit-driven, almost Chablis-like style. Stony nuances just add to that perception. Lees, subtle oak, and some buttery touches contribute to a complex wine. Restrained intensity, and it responds well to airing.
94 points
Stonefruit, white flowers, almond meal, almost a mint perfume, and fine spicy oak. Medium bodied, ripe fruit, but with citrus and firm flinty texture as a foil, almond gloss, intensity, and a huge push through the finish with ripe lemon and biscuitty flavour, and that flinty precision as farewell. You could decant if drinking now, though I’ say it needs time in bottle more than anything.
94+ points
A little muted to begin although the fruit (vineyard) quality billows with time in glass: restrained nashi skin, get deeper peach yellows and kernel with time. Has chew, peel and tightness in the mouth, an excercise in structure rather than flavour. But there's plenty to hang onto. Needs a while.
95 (97)/100
While this wine is immensely enjoyable now with its slightly softer approach, faint floral/gum notes, delicate clove and cinnamon aromas, and a little stem impact from some whole bunch in the make, there is a latent power in the wine, a grip that suggests this may build into a surprise package in a couple of years.
Of three fine Tapanappa chardonnay iterations, ranging from $39 to $79, this comes from a small close-spaced section, clonally selected – we’re getting into deeply serious wine craft here – where the result is distinctively different, its white stone fruit flavours concentrated, acidity tight, and the mouthfeel superfine. Impressive.
5 stars
Complex cashew, vanilla, malt and gently dairy-like aromas; the palate soft and seamless, refined and long with savouriness, length and finesse. It's young and will build even greater character with a little more time.
Brian Croser’s Foggy Hill vineyard is on one of the coldest and wettest sites in the state, chosen to nurture a pinot that clearly revels in the climate there. This is exciting, high-toned wine with vibrant varietal aromatics of crushed black cherry fruit, and wooded and bush herbals adding a forest-like background to a sweetly spotted mouthful of pure fruit joys. It’s delicious, drinkable and delightfully svelte.
5 stars
The final barriques of 2016 vintage wines have been filled awaiting the finish of malo-lactic fermentation. In our vineyards in the Piccadilly Valley, at Parawa, on the Fleurieu Peninsula and at Wrattonbully it has been an abundant vintage of full flavoured ripe fruit wines, the reds displaying bright, intense colours.
2016 vintage was dry, very warm, moderate (no heatwaves), early and compressed between regions and varieties.
