Arras 30th Anniversary EJ Carr Late Disgorged 2006

Written By Campbell Mattinson
Bottle of Arras 30th Anniversary EJ Carr Late Disgorged 2006.

Arras 30th Anniversary EJ Carr Late Disgorged 2006
AU$330, 13% alcohol, DIAM cork, Tasmania.

Officially this spent 16 years on lees, which is more than staggering enough, though the truth is that it was almost 17 years, having spent 16 years and 10 months maturing on its lees, in bottle. Now that is commitment. I’ve tasted this wine a few times over the years, at various disgorgement dates. and it has always (seriously) impressed. Only 1566 bottles of this 30-year-anniversary edition have been released.

Fruit for this wine was sourced from various Tasmanian sub-regions: Derwent Valley, East Coast, Coal River Valley and Tamar Valley. It’s 66% chardonnay, 34% pinot noir, and has an incredibly low dosage of 1.7 grams/litre.

When I first opened this bottle it smelled quite remarkable: it smelled of pure, fresh cinnamon donuts. In fact it smelled so overtly of cinnamon donuts that I tipped my glass and re-poured, just to make sure that the impression was true. It was. It settled, from there, into a wine of quite remarkable complexity, offering flavours of: sweet breads, strawberries, caramel, honey, seaweed, baked apples fresh from the oven, salt, toasted almonds and yellow, juicy, dried stonefruit, the latter burned on a hot summer road, and then rained on. There isn’t a huge amount of bead or fizz here now but boy is it a stunning (sparkling) wine to drink.

96 points – Campbell Mattinson.

Campbell Mattinson

This post was written by Campbell Mattinson. Mattinson is a former chief editor of the Halliday Wine Companion book, former editor of Halliday magazine, former editor of Australian Sommelier Magazine and founder of The Winefront business. He is the author of five books on wine – four of which were bestsellers (The Wine Hunter, the Big Red Wine Book 2008, the Big Red Wine Book 2009, and the Big Red Wine Book 2010).

Mattinson is also the founder of the Mattinson Photography business.

Campbell Mattinson has been an independent journalist, wine critic and photographer for forty years. He’s the only Australian to have won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year Award more than once. He’s a past winner of a Louis Roederer International Wine Media Award; is the author of the award-winning book The Wine Hunter; and is the author of the best-selling novel We Were Not Men. He’s also a winner of a St Kilda Film Festival Award (as writer-director) and is a former winner of the national Best Australian Sports Writing Award. In 2026 three of his photographs were short-listed for the World Food Photography Awards.

Campbell Mattinson, who is 100% independent, has tasted between 5000 and 10,000 wines each and every year for the past 25 years. He tastes blind, in comparative brackets, as often as is practicable.

Campbell Mattinson is a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker and a wine critic. In all of these mediums his prime motive is to tell people's stories.

https://www.campbellmattinson.com
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