I love spending time with people who know more about wine than I do. Last Saturday I spent an enriching couple of hours with a young mate who gave me the tip about this wine. I'd lost contact with Tom for awhile and I wonder how I could have been so careless because he has found us all a beauty with this one. Yes, all the way from the casa of naranjas comes this very funky red with an equally funky label. Produced from 20-50 year old vines I can tell you unreservedly that THIS IS NOT THE RED FOR EVERYONE. It's savoury, it's subtle, it's at the light end of medium bodied and it is DRY. If you understand Tempranillo then jump in the deep end and grab a dozen - you'll love it. It's a brilliant red but if you're uncertain pick a few in a mixed dozen.
Our Price: $15 per bottle by the dozen
SOLD OUT
A Tyrrell's VAT Red for just $20????
You better believe it and this is a definite candidate for "Buy of the Year".
The lovely Helen from Tyrrell's paid me a visit last week with a tasting bottle under her arm. Each rep had been given an allocation of 20 dozen at this absurd price. I was the sixth call of the day and everyone had bought from her so far - a dozen each.
I apologised for breaking the pattern, I'll take the fifteen dozen left.
Good luck to those other 5 retailers. They'll whack their dozen on their racks at $50+ a bottle, maybe take a year or two to sell it and enjoy a pretty good margin. It will be interesting to see how long my 15 dozen last.
This is THE iconic Tyrrell's Vat label. All those fonts, all those italics and that lovely "nil magnum nisi bonum established 1858" logo. It was the label of my youth, along with the sadly subsequently mistreated Lindemans HR wines. Thankfully, under family stewardship, the Tyrrell's has survived to be the label of my late middle age.
The wine? Oh yes, the wine.
It's outstanding in a subtle, elegant, slightly mysterious way. So many wines give their all on the first sip and there are no exciting surprises throughout the bottle. This is about as far removed from a McLaren Vale blockbuster as you could get and yet that's where 25% of the blend comes from. Bruce Tyrrell describes it as a tribute to the multi regional, multi varietal styles they were making in the mid 1900's.
The blend is 75% Hunter Shiraz, 15% McLaren Vale Grenache and 10% McLaren Vale Malbec. All the juice was aged in old French oak of varying sizes before final blending. Alcohol is just 13% and I reckon this has definite mid to long term cellaring potential.
Is the style old fashioned? Definitely. Is it outdated? Definitely not.
Our Price: $ 20 per bottle by the dozen
SOLD OUT
