Ripe black fruits with lifted aroma of cedar and cigar box oak and pepper. Delicious juicy rich fruit balanced nicely with a good whack of oak tannin giving amazing length.

Our boutique vineyard and winery is a family enterprise intent on making concentrated, sophisticated and complex wines inspired by our unique Heathcote terroir, a fault line of ancient Cambrian red rock pulverised over 510 million years into soil. We have utilised the vertical shoot positioning trellis system to open up the canopy, reduce the risk of disease and expose bunches to direct sun light for ripening. The vines are cane pruned to a single fruiting wire with a maximum 20 buds per vine. Crop levels are naturally low and irrigation kept to a minimum with some blocks unirrigated. To conserve the natural balance within the soils and hence the overall health of the vines, we aim to minimise the use of chemicals. It is our practice to utilise organic principles in the first instance such as organic fertilisers and mulching to control weed growth and then if absolutely necessary, use small amounts of chemicals to target specific parts of the vineyard.

We utilise traditional winemaking practices that are labour intensive but within a modern understanding of its ways. The grapes that make up this blend were destemmed and then whole berries transferred to small open fermenters using gravity (to avoid pump shock). Our philosophy when blending this wine is to achieve the ultimate expression of our vineyard, all the elements in concentration and perfect harmony. 70% of this wine had 6 days on skins with 2-3 days of fermentation before being gravity fed to new French oak barriques at 4 Be’ for completion in barrel. This has become the hallmark of the D’Orsa as it gives us the wonderful soft texture that we believe is a key character of classic Heathcote shiraz. The resulting wine spends 18 months in 70% new French oak 30% old French oak. The wine is racked once by gravity before being minimally filtered at bottling.