Beginning with the 1995 vintage, Chris Ringland has produced two wines from his vineyard. The Three Rivers comes from a lower yielding, more intense block of vines. This wine is aged in 100% French oak, coopered by AP John, a South Australian barrel maker. The Randall?s Hill bottling comes from sections of the vineyard that offer prettier, less tightly-structured fruit and is aged in French-coopered barrels. Chris feels that the Aussie-made barrels give Three Rivers more of a tighter cedar/cigar box character while the French-made barrels add more assertive bacon fat and smoky notes to the Randall?s Hill. Due to the unpredictability of each vintage, he purchases enough of both types of barrels each year to produce the entire harvest as one wine or another as he feels appropriate. Chris Ringland?s underlying philosophy about winemaking is that you can?t make great wine unless you?ve harvested great grapes. Winemaking must be a minimalist transformation from grapes into wine. He credits Robert O?Callaghan?s non-interventionist, minimal manipulation approach to winemaking as a major influence. Following a Burgundian model, he was among the first people in the Barossa Valley to take seriously the idea of making very serious wine from an individual parcel of grapes and limiting his production levels to that parcel.

Shiraz - Randall Hill
1997 $249.99