First Creek Wines 2020 Shiraz "Harvest", Australia

First Creek is an old family winery from Hunter Valley producing a range of wines, but it is their lower priced Harvest Shiraz that first caught our eye.  (Actually it was the red tractor on the clean label that caught our eye first, but the wine inside turned our heads around about spotlighting a Shiraz from Down Under.)

Jessica Martinez, whose responsibility it is to discover fine wines from Australia for the store (and if they’re affordable, all the better), quietly acquired this wine for our racks. 

"The optimum picked fruit was fermented in open fermenters and then matured in older, large format French oak barrels," she wrote. "Minimal winemaking intervention, combined with larger casks, highlights pure fruit characters without letting oak dominate."  She described the "luscious aromas of red berry fruit with hints of spiced pepper and chocolate." She added, "the palate is medium-bodied with well structured tannins and a smooth lingering finish." She also told me she bought it because she thought it might make a good Wine of the Month.  I took the red tractor to our tasting room, opened the bottle, and was quite impressed by what I sampled.

First off, it is more classically structured than most of the goober-goo, salty Shirazes of the past, a promising sign.  The flavor of the medium-bodied wine has a bit more complexity than expected, another good sign.  Finally, the aftertaste is clean, not laden with oak gobs, and that is the dealmaker for me.  It means I crave another sip, and it possesses the proper acidity to help out my meal instead of burying it.

“How much is this?” I asked her.

“$12.99,” she responded.

“Find out if we can get a good chunk of this for the store.  If you do, it’s our new Wine of the Month.”