Can you tell us a little about the newest, and now most premium, Red in your portfolio, The Patron?
Taltarni The Patron is a 1:1 blend of Shiraz and Cabernet grapes. Crafted from the best blocks on our estate, the aim was to create a unique co-fermented Shiraz Cabernet. Blending these two varietals allows us to create a wine that demonstrates the best fruit and winemaking techniques that our vineyard has to offer.
What are the defining characteristics of the wine?
The 1:1 blend creates a wine with beautiful balance. The Cabernet provides a lovely earthy, savoury note with a hint of brambly blue fruits. The Shiraz gives weight, body and structure to the wine and adds hints of red fruit and spice. On the palette you find the wine has lovely length, good depth and excellent persistence. The silky tannin and structural components of the wine display slightly more of the Cabernet character, particularly blue fruit flavours.
Official Tasting Note: “With a brooding deep red appearance, The Patron shows ripe, concentrated red berry and spice on the nose accompanied by subtle oak. The palate highlights the concentration and complexity of the blend while displaying great elegance with a lingering silky texture.”
What inspired you to create The Patron?
We wanted to create a wine that portrays the best that the vineyard can deliver in such a manner that pays homage to the estate rather than the varieties in the blend. We’d seen glimpses of the outstanding fruit †hat our old vines can produce and wanted to create a wine that encapsulates this quality across varieties.
What was unique about the winemaking process for this 2016 vintage?
The Patron comprises of two blocks of each variety, each one-acre in size, that are thinned to one tonne per acre with a green harvest at veraison. Throughout the growing season we are constantly assessing the fruit to guarantee optimum quality. This process ensures a low-yielding vintage concentration of the flavour and complexity which epitomises our terroir. Shiraz and Cabernet ripen at different times with the Shiraz fruit harvested first. After growing to optimum ripeness, we hand-pick these grapes and store in cold store. The Cabernet grapes are hand-picked in the cool of the morning 3 weeks later. Following harvest, each variety was destemmed before undergoing co-fermentation – fermenting the varieties together in our own unique winemaking method. The co-fermented grapes were left on skins in the tank during and after fermentation for 6-weeks to undergo maceration and extract flavour, colour and soften the tannin through polymerisation. The result is a wine with fantastic body that showcases the best of both grape varieties and provides a strong representation of our vineyard.
What is the barrel composition?
This wine spent 24 months in a 60% New French Oak barriques, with 2 specific coopers used. Only wine from the best barrels was selected to ensure true representation of the harvest was delivered. This aging process ensures The Patron will soften and develop a lovely finesse and balance that is not overpowered by oak – rather allowing the winemaking and estate fruit to shine.
Can The Patron be enjoyed upon release, or is it only for Cellaring?
It’s difficult to produce a wine that drinks well now and will also cellar well. The Patron is a wine we are really proud of at Taltarni. It’s approachable on release with structure, finesse, drive and concentration that continues to strengthen as it ages. The wine is aged for one year prior to release allowing it time to acclimatise and settle in bottle. Taltarni has always produced fantastic food friendly wines with great textural components and can age brilliantly. The Patron is an excellent example of this complex structure.
How often will Patron be produced?
The Patron is a representation of the best that the vineyard has to offer. Thus, it will be produced using grapes from vintages that produce fruit we believe to be exceptional in nature. Production of The Patron will be limited to approx. 100 – 150 cases per vintage.