Yangarra Ovitelli Grenache 2024
Yangarra Ovitelli Grenache 2024
AU$80, 14% alcohol, screwcap, McLaren Vale.
The strength of this wine is also, in a way, its weakness, though all told it’s an excellent wine. It offers a core of sweet, raspberried fruit flavour – matched by perfumed, raspberried scent – around which sits an elaborate casing of twiggy spices, autumn leaf notes, pure licorice, earth, mint and roses. It has that hint of sweetness but it’s not overtly bright; it feels surly, or suggestive of surliness at the very least. Tannin is where we get into interesting territory. It presents a broad, sheeted, sweeping wave of dry, earthen, almost-grainy tannin, which itself is beautifully formed, if not magnificent. My only hesitation – the ‘weakness’ bit – is whether this tannin doesn’t pull the wine up a fraction. I thought that it definitely did, at first; as it breathed it seemed to stretch, and my concern was less. Modern Australian grenache can be very nebbiolo-like and this wine is certainly that. I’m aware that this wine has scored (very) highly elsewhere; I’m being a bit more conservative, though time may well prove them right; either way, it’s all pretty compelling.
94+ points – Campbell Mattinson.
[Footnote: This wine was made by the late Peter Fraser. That his name is printed on the back of the bottle is fitting, excellent and sad all at once].
