Rosemount Balmoral Syrah

Just five years ago Rosemount Estate released the first vintage of its premium South Australian shiraz, the 1989 McLaren Vale Show Syrah. It took a year and a half to sell out. Two years later, having won two trophies and five gold medals, the 1991 vintage of the same wine sold out in three months, priced around $18 per bottle. The 1995 vintage, the fourth to sport the Balmoral Syrah label, is destined for release in November this year for around $45 per bottle. It will probably sell out in weeks.

Everything about the Balmoral Syrah appears to have fallen neatly into place. From Rosemount’s secure access to low-yielding old vine vineyards located largely around Blewitt Springs and McLaren Flat to the confident way that Philip Shaw handles a range of fermentation techniques and selects 100 brand-new American oak for maturation. From the label’s consistent success in Australian and international wine shows to the response it achieves in the international wine press. From its package and presentation to the upward trend shown by its retail price. A star is not so much born as it is nurtured through infancy to maturity.

Throughout the mid 1980s the major market for Rosemount’s Diamond Label Shiraz was the US. Rosemount’s American distributors told Philip Shaw that if he could create an ultra-premium show reserve wine, they could easily sell it. Created and named for the Francophilic US market, the Show Syrah 1989 was the result. Later, to the chagrin of their US agents, Rosemount decided to make the wine available in the UK and Australia as well. Just as well, if you ask me.

With no press, no promotion, no track record and no provenance, the 1989 was a hard sell. Today it’s clearly the most ready of the Balmorals/Show Syrahs to drink, the outcome of a hot, dry season that later turned cool. A highly evolved and assertive wine evocative of wild berries, mushrooms, coffee and treacle, it’s wonderfully smooth and spicy, with meaty/leathery complexity and a hint of aldehyde. I rate it at 18.0 and suggest that any bottles remaining be uncorked over the next five years.

Outcome of one of the hottest recent seasons, the 1990 Show Syrah has southern Rhone-ish pretensions. A robust, concentrated wine whose deep flavours of pepper, cassis and black cherry fruit are matched with the sweet leather of bottle-age and slightly varnishy oak, it makes up in power what it might lack in sophistication. That said, it’s a long-term wine suited to at least another five years of development. I score it 18.5.

For mine still the most impressive wine of this dual lineage, the 1991 Show Syrah is an incredibly deeply flavoured, sumptuously structured and concentrated wine still able to appear elegant and refined despite its sheer magnitude. Bursting with dark cherries and plums, flaunting its tarry, treacly bottle-aged complexity, it finishes savoury with a remarkable length of silky-smooth and tight-knit tannins. Wonderfully balanced, it does what few modern Australian wines can do. I rate it at 19.3 and wonder how on earth it only won two trophies. Its triumph at the International Wine Challenge as the winner of the trophy for the Best Rhone Style Red confirmed Rosemount’s decision to fashion an international brand from its premium McLaren Vale shiraz. Months of searching for a name then began and eventually out popped the answer: Balmoral, the name of one of the Oatley family’s estates in the Upper Hunter, built in 1852 by the same Scot who named another of his properties ‘Roxburgh’.

The cool, late and mild 1992 vintage produced the first Balmoral, a wine startlingly more refined and elegant from those from warmer years which preceded it. Velvet-smooth and elegant, this wine is now revealing a sufficient concentration of fruit to match its assertive chocolate and creamy oak. Multi-layered in its expression of finely-honed earthy, varietal and oak-driven characters, supremely harmonious and integrated, it will develop for at least a decade on its balance alone. Wonderful stuff, a great debut for a new prestige label and worth every mark of the 19.0 I give it.

From the most difficult year the series has experienced, 1993’s wine is beginning to resemble a leafier version of the 1989. A cool, wet spring and rainfall in early summer helped fashion a brambly, peppery and more herbaceous wine with intense confection-like flavours of beetroot, raspberries and cherries. More restrained and supple than other Balmorals, its tannins still reveal a slightly green edge and its oak is a little more assertive than those of superior balance. I point it at 17.7 and suggest it be given another four years.

Beginning with a warm spring, but finishing cool and dry towards the season’s end, 1994 produced a Balmoral fashioned along very similar lines to the 1992. Typically fine-grained, supple and supremely elegant, this wine is now coming out of its shell to reveal highly-spiced raspberry and cherry fruit now able to match its smoky, mocha oak qualities. High-toned acids and fine tannins will ensure a cellar life of at least another eight to ten years. I rate the wine 18.8.

1995 was a drought season, but another cool one. Still closed and biding its time, this is one of the best South Australian 1995 reds I have tasted, deeply spiced with chocolate and smoky cigarbox oak, soaked in dark cherries and plums. Elegant, smooth yet assertive enough, the wine lacks the length of its predecessors on the palate and finishes with a slight sappiness. Time will tell if it outgrows these youthful imbalances, but I am happy to award the wine 18.2 in the meantime, with the suggestion that it be matured for another six and ten years.

Philip Shaw makes between 2,000 and 2,500 cases of Balmoral Syrah each year. His approach to its making has been remarkably consistent since the wine’s inception, allowing the vintage to set the variations about the theme. The wines are made with a hot 30?C fermentation in both open fermenters and vinomatics, before the vinomatic component is allowed to remain on skins for between one and two weeks. The other finishes its fermentation in oak. The 1989 and 1990 vintages were given eighteen months in new American oak, medium to high toast. 1991 and 1992 received twenty-four months, while those since have received twenty. The vines for Balmoral are between 50 and 100 years of age, cropping an average of between 1.5 to 2.5 tonnes per acre.

Will Balmoral become an international benchmark? I honestly think so. Balmoral looks like it really has its bases covered. Please login to post comment