This is the third vintage of this wine I’ve tasted, and I do believe it’s getting better with each iteration. Looking back over my notes, the 2008 was a significant advance over the 2007. The current vintage is again a really good expression of Barossa Grenache, notable for the way it balances typically sweet fruit with a range of sappy, savoury notes.

The nose is clean and highly expressive, showing sharp snapped succulent and fresh red fruit, coffee, brown spice and charry oak. The fruit and oak influences are very well balanced, fruit presenting first then relaxing into complex, subtle, pleasingly rustic barrel-derived notes. It’s both warm and fresh at the same time, sort of like wearing the warmest, wooliest jumper you own on a crisp, early Spring day.

The palate is true to the nose in both flavour profile and balance, starting early and sustaining fruit presence along most of its line. There’s a core of clean, medicinal fruit around which a range of other flavours gather, some fruit and some from oak. Reasonable intensity (Yelland & Papps wines never seem to want to be powerhouses, even the upper labels), medium weight, nice drive. A bit of heat, but I expect that from this style of wine. The only disappointment here is a simplistic texture that is just a bit too pumped up and slippery for its own good. I’d like to see more tannin texture and dimensionality. It’s a small niggle, though.

Very nice, strongly regional Grenache.

Yelland & Papps
Price: $A32
Closure: Stelvin
Source: Sample