Grosset Alea Riesling 2017
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Spirits
Wine &
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Winemaker Notes
This is an amazing Riesling, perhaps the best yet under this label. It has intense lemon grass and lime juice characters which follow through on to the palate. The flavors are intensely concentrated, powerful and show incredible depth. The vibrant natural acidity balances the sweetness and lingers long and dry on the finish.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
To describe this wine’s flavors as lemon rock candy would be leaving off the savory notes of fossilized shells, and the smoky, saline richness that you get from the head of a roasted prawn. As expansive as the flavors become, they are also precise, hints of sweetness driving the flavor from all corners of the mouth while piercing acidity lengthens the stony character. This will be at its best ten years from the vintage.
Other Vintages
2022-
Companion
Australian Wine -
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Companion
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Parker
Robert
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Enthusiast
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Suckling
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Wine
Jeffrey Grosset, owner and founder, has always been an innovator, challenging tradition and questioning accepted practices. He campaigned to institute the legal integrity of the Riesling grape in Australia, was a leading proponent for the introduction of screwcap closures and privately funded research into the subject.
Grosset Wines’ philosophy has remained steadfast over thirty years. The emphasis is on purity of fruit. The estate vineyards, which are ACO certified organic, are hand tended and each bunch of grapes is harvested at optimum ripeness. The winemaking process is gentle and uncomplicated. With dedication, discipline and the application of knowledge garnered through decades of experience, the result is the finest expression of variety and place.
Riesling possesses a remarkable ability to reflect the character of wherever it is grown while still maintaining its identity. A regal variety of incredible purity and precision, this versatile grape can be just as enjoyable dry or sweet, young or old, still or sparkling and can age longer than nearly any other white variety. Somm Secret—Given how difficult it is to discern the level of sweetness in a Riesling from the label, here are some clues to find the dry ones. First, look for the world “trocken.” (“Halbtrocken” or “feinherb” mean off-dry.) Also a higher abv usually indicates a drier Riesling.
The Clare Valley is actually a series of narrow north to south valleys, each with a different soil type and slightly different weather patterns along their stretch. In the southern heartland between Watervale and Auburn, there is mainly a crumbled, red clay loam soil called terra rossa and cool breezes come in from Gulf St. Vincent. A few miles north, in Polish Hill, is soft, red loam over clay; westerlies blowing in from the Spencer Gulf influece this area's climate.
The differences in soil, elevation, degree of slope and weather enable the region to produce some of Australia’s finest, aromatic, spicy and lime-pithy Rieslings, as well as excellent Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec with ripe plummy fruit, good acid and big structure.
Clare Valley is an isolated farming country with a continental climate known for its warm and sunny days, followed by cool nights—perfect for wine grapes’ development of sugar and phenolic ripeness in conjunction with notable acidity levels.