AUSTRALIAN WINE

Bright flavours, fresh and light in style - and lighter in alcohol too with 9% ABV. Sauvignon Blanc is well suited to lower alcohol wines because it's so intense in flavour and this lively wine expresses that with its tropical fruit aromas, fresh herb tastes and its fresh zesty acidity, which adds balance and length of taste.

A great wine to drink when you want less alcohol but still want to enjoy a drink or two. That little bit less alcohol makes a big difference... and here's a tasty example which is also dry in style with 5 grams residual sugar (that's natural sugar from the grapes, retained from stopping the fermentation early). 

The Vasse Felix Filius Chardonnay is pale straw with a green tinge in the glass. The nose is lifted, elegant and complex with honey nougat, pineapple and lemon notes. The palate is restrained and complex with some creaminess coupled with natural acidity. Notes of lemon pith with hints of lime and toasty vanilla carry on to a long, dry finish.

Grange is Australia's most collectible wine on the auction market and is listed as a Heritage Icon of South Australia. It was first created in the 1950s by the late Max Schubert, winemaker at Penfolds, whose aim was to create a Shiraz to end all Shirazes. His wine was controversial when first tasted with others at the winery but has since grown to become a liquid expression of South Australia's hot climate, its most planted grape variety and winemaking with all the bells and whistles. It's always youthful when first bottled and can age for decades, in the correct cellaring conditions. 

"Strongly marked, as always, by its 100% American oak elevage, the 2017 Grange backs up cedar and vanilla notes with ample blackberry and cassis fruit. Full bodied, ripe and decadently creamy, it's loaded with substance, concentration and rich, but, in the context of Grange, a relatively light and elegant finish. Only the seventh ever Grange to be exclusively Shiraz, it originates from Barossa Valley (86%) and McLaren Vale (14%); Shiraz from other growing regions in South Australia failed to make the grade this year."

Rating 96/100 Joe Czerwinski

Drinking date from 2023 to 2040

A tasty dry Fiano from South Australia full of waxy appeal and lushness. This excellent well priced wine is modelled on the great Fianos from the Campania region in southern Italy.

Hogshead is made by South Australian winemakers Jim Zerella and Nicholas Crampton and is one of our best value Aussie Shirazes. It's dry with dark fruit flavours, a full body and spicy notes. A wine with a full body and smooth style. Tasty and great value. 

Meet Ox Hardy Shiraz; an elegant spicy and ripe black plummy wine with beautiful structure, which is made with grapes grown in Blewitt Springs in McLaren Vale, south of Adelaide, where sea breezes cool down the vines. Following harvest, the fruit was destemmed and crushed into fermenters with inoculated yeasts and gentle extraction of colour, tannin and flavour. The wine was drained off and the skins bag-pressed before being transferred to French Oak second fill barriques and three new hogsheads. It aged for 18 months in oak before being bottled with minimal filtration.

Ox Hardy is the brainchild of founder Andrew Hardy, whose nickname is Ox and whose great great grandfather was Thomas Hardy; the father of the South Australian wine industry.

Son's of Eden Pumpa is a full bodied red blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz and Tempranillo, all grown in the Eden Valley, a higher altitude and slightly cooler climate area of the Barossa Valley. 

This wine is named as a tribute to Len Pumpa and his fellow Eden Valley winemakers who pioneered one of Australia's most challenging but rewarding winemaking regions. 

Eden Valley had a mix of British and continental European settlers that tried their hand at grape-growing. When times were tough particularly in the 1920s many turned away from viticulture, however the Prussian settlers like Len Pumpa persisted in the face of difficulty, preserving the vineyard resources we are custodians of today.

This Grenache, Shiraz, Mouvedre show a classical bouquet of blackberry, raspberry, spice, and cocoa. The palate is full and round with concentrated dark fruits, keen acid and silky tannins. Winemaker Corey Ryan "cut his teeth? at Henschke where he worked for ten years.

Here's a red fruited, perfumed Grenache from Australia with a light touch and a refreshing backbone of acidity adding depth and length to this wine. It is made from certified organic vineyard planted in 1946, dry grown in red loamy clay with ironstone over deep limestone. It has spicy aromas, concentrated flavours of red and a note of wild thyme and white pepper. 

The grapes in this wine were all hand picked, given 65 per cent whole bunch fermentation with some carbonic maceration and all fermented with wild yeasts. It was aged in French barriques then bottled unfined and unfiltered. It has a modest alcohol content of 12.2 % ABV.

We have small volumes of Ochota Barrels wines in store at Regional. Get in quick.

Ripe powerful aromas of blackberries combine with black olives and spice in this great expression of Cabernet Sauvignon from South Australia. The wine is deep crimson with aromas of lifted berries, spicy oak and a medium body.

A keeper for at least a decade and also drinks well now, decanted for two to three hours and served in large glasses to accentuate its ripe dark fruity flavour spectrum.

Langmeil is owned by the Lindner family, which has been making wine for six generations in the Barossa Valley.

Pirrimimma was the first winery in Australia to grow the thick skinned Petit Verdot grape.

It's renowned for being an early budding, late ripening red grape with thick skins and powerful depth of colour, flavour and weight. This late ripening dark skinned grape is originally thought to come from Bordeaux in south west France where it can often struggle to ripen fully, hence it is most commonly used as a blending component to add depth to wines made from Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Ironically, it ripens best when it is least needed, as Master of Wine Jancis Robinson writes in the bible of grape varieties, Wine Grapes. 

In the warmest, driest best years, all of the grapes that struggle to ripen (Cabernets and Petit Verdot in particular) all tend to ripen well. Another good reason for seeking out good quality Bordeaux in dry vintages.

Which leads us to the Southern Hemisphere and to South Australia where Pirramimma Wines is based and this lovely red comes from.

Legend of Aussie wine, Peter Lehmann made his fame and fortune from spicy deep rich Shiraz, such as this sensational full bodied example, which is now seven years old and drinking like a dream.

New wave Australian white which is a funky field blend of Gew?rztraminer, Riesling and Kerner, which has deep aromatic flavours of Turkish Delight, lime zest and acidity to burn. This adds great length of flavour to every succulent sip.