2019 Torbreck The Laird Shiraz, Barossa Valley

Sourced from a single block of 1958-planted shiraz on the border of Maranaga and Seppeltsfield; matured for 36 months in new French oak coopered by Dominique Laurent. This wine always makes my head spin, in the best way possible. It's prodigiously proportioned with superb concentration and fruit density: blackberry, black cherry, cassis cut with hints of tobacco leaf, dark chocolate, Christmas cake, vanilla bean, bay leaf, sarsaparilla, wood spice, roasting meats, panforte, cedar and mahogany and earth. All at volume. All singing from the same hymn sheet. Layers of spice with thick-shouldered powdery tannins sedimentary and melting back into the fruit. For a wine of such horsepower, it has grace and balance and there is no doubt it will age for decades. A stunner.

98 points DB winecompanion.com.au

It is funny how truly great wines make me think of another other than wine. When I first inhaled the scent of 2018 The Laird, I heard music, which was somewhat unnerving. The phenomenal perfume here conjured up Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave – a distant musical memory from my youth. I have never seen this famous sea cave firsthand, so I searched for it on my phone while diving into this glass. If this wine looks like any marine geological formation, it must  be this incredible cavern on the uninhabited island of Staffa. It is fantastic to think that Mendelssohn sat  in a boat, off Staffa, in 1829 and penned a couple of bars of music inspired by this cave. Some 15 years later, the first vines were planted in Barossa.