After quickly dismissing the five geese Shiraz last night as being essentially boring, I realized over the next couple of hours spent with the wine that it wasn’t boring, really, but rather incredibly elegant. If you like your Syrah unencumbered by challenge – and I really don’t mean for that to sound as condescending as it undeniably is – then the five geese is really a lovely wine (and excellent value for money). Everything about it was absolutely even-keeled, with that lovely South Australian rich red fruit well supported by oh-so-tasteful oak. It’s just that it left me feeling, well, just a little bit bored.This wine – which is from a warmer wine growing region about two hours’ up the road from McLaren Vale – cost roughly the same amount of money, but doesn’t seem at all stylistically allied with the five geese. Instead, the Ross Estate seems much more idiosyncratic, offering up all kinds of sensory experiences that you can choose to view as either charming or annoying, depending on who you are and what you want from a bottle of wine.This wine looks much darker, denser, and older than the five geese. It’s nearly black in the glass with some browning/fading at the rim; it looks very much like soy sauce or old balsamic vineyard. On the nose, it seems to offer up a whiff of volatile acidity, dill pickle, dusty old barrel, neglected library books, and unaired cupboards. It also offers up finely ground cocoa powder, rich spicy oak, elegant, serious red-black fruit, and freshly baked pecan pie crust. In short, it comes at you from all sides at the same time; it’s either woefully backwards or tantalizingly, classically Old World depending on what kind of a mindset you’ve got.Simultaneously somewhat thin (at first) and paradoxically very mouth filling (thanks to lovely fat tannins that are not yet fully resolved), a mouthful of this wine strikes me as being frankly pretty massive, but not alcoholic. It tastes of lush red fruit coated in spicy cocoa nibs, all with refreshing acidity and moderately huge tannins that would work incredibly well with roast mutton. The finish stays around for a good long while, with faint hints of white pepper and dried herbs; there’s also a suggestion of butter toffee walnuts or burnt sugar. It’s much darker and somehow more serious than the five geese, but the acidity and relatively wild aromas on the nose could be less than appetizing for some folks.To sum up, this wine is more like what I’m looking for when I drink syrah, but from a technical standpoint isn’t necessarily better or worse than the five geese. If your preference is for wines of subtlety, balance, and elegance, choose the five geese; if you like it a little rough, with heavier, darker, cocoa-dusted edges, then this is probably a better call. Either of them are drinking beautifully now, and I’d reckon they still have a few years left to go before fading into obscurity.Really good stuff.Ross Estate
Price: $16
Closure: Cork
Source: Retail