Chapel Hill The Devil House Block Shiraz 2022
Chapel Hill The Devil House Block Shiraz 2022
$180, 14.5% alcohol, screwcap, McLaren Vale.
The Devil is the top-of-the-tree release from renowned McLaren Vale winery Chapel Hill. It’s grown on vines planted in 1977, and spends 20 months in a combination of French and American oak.
This is a seriously seductive bottle of Australian red wine. It’s full-bodied but ever-so-soft, and while it’s complex the first and lasting impression is that it presents as one, unified, delicious front of dark, beautiful flavour. It’s a wine that you just want to swim in. It tastes of blackcurrant and ripe, fresh, sweet plums, mostly, though these flavours are delicately wrapped in notes of chocolate, peppercorn, vanilla and a particularly earthen expression of coffee. The finish here is so soft and svelte that it almost – but not quite – feels milky, and the fineness of the tannin is such that it almost disappears into the fruit. This is McLaren Vale shiraz in glory mode. 95 points.
