Wine Advisor
Torbreck, RunRig 2004
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Description
Tasting notes
Reviewed by: Josh Raynolds
(95% shiraz and 5% viognier) Inky ruby. Hugely aromatic, pungent bouquet of dark berries, kirsch, fresh flowers, licorice and minerals. Expansive dark fruit flavors completely suffuse the palate and are brightened by vibrant notes of fresh flowers and graphite. Wonderfully creamy in texture, with no rough edges. Tannins slowly sneak in on the finish, adding structure to this dramatically concentrated, sappy shiraz. The persistence of fruit here is amazing.
Reviewed by: Jay S Miller
The flagship 2004 Run Rig is 96.5% Shiraz and 3.5% Viognier with the Shiraz component aged for 30 months in a mixture of new and used French oak. Yields were a minuscule 14 hl/ha (about 1 ton per acre). Saturated opaque purple/black, it has a remarkably kinky, exotic perfume of fresh asphalt, pencil lead, smoke, pepper, game, blueberry and black raspberry. Full-bodied and voluptuous in the mouth, the wine is dense and packed, with amazing purity, sweet tannins, and a complex collection of sensory stimuli. The wine demands 10 years of cellaring and will provide hedonistic delights through 2035+. Torbreck, under the leadership of owner/winemaker David Powell, remains a Barossa Valley benchmark as well as one of the world’s greatest wine estates. The top cuvees are limited production and expensive but there are also some outstanding values in the portfolio. With regard to the current vintages for the Barossa red wines, David Powell states “? 2004 is more savory while 2005 has more purity and definition. 2004 is more classic, 2005 will take longer to come around.” Importer: Jon Elkins, The Australian Wine Connection, Carlsbad, CA; www.torbreck.com
About the Producer
Although only 10 years old, Tobrey Estate has some of the oldest vineyards in the Barossa Valley, Australia's most sacred wine region. David Powell, the founder of Tobrey Winery, was introduced to wine through his uncle when he was studying economics at university. In the 25 years since he graduated, David Powell has spent his time learning about winemaking at prestigious wineries and in Europe, the United States and the Barossa Valley, and in the 1990s he began reaching out to local landowners to learn about their mostly dead, overgrown and neglected vineyards. Over time, David brought them back to life. He then began negotiating contracts with landowners to use these vineyards. By the end of 2003, he had signed long-term contracts with 35 local winegrowers who owned old vine vineyards. Today, David Powell is one of Australia's leading talents in making Rhone Valley style red wines. The winery is currently owned by Pete Kight. Currently, the vineyards at Tolbray cover 250 acres (101 hectares) and are planted to Grenache, Shiraz, Mourvedre, Viognier, Marsanne, Roussanne, Frontignac and Cabernet Sauvignon. Frontignac and Carbernet Sauvignon, among others. The average age of the vines is 60 years and the planting density is 1,500 vines per hectare. The winemaking philosophy of Château Tobré is based on the idea that quality wines are made in the vineyard through pre-bottling cultivation. Therefore, most of the grapes used in the winemaking are harvested from old vine vines, selected from the different sub-appellations of the Barossa Valley. The winery judges the harvest based on the ripeness of the fruit flavors, not the sugar level, so that it can obtain grapes from vines with optimal tannin, acidity and physiological ripeness. Once the grapes are harvested and returned, the winery makes the wine using very traditional winemaking techniques, starting with a gentle destemming of the grapes and then slowly pumping them into fermentation vessels with open tops, rotating them in a cycle twice a day with a mandatory complete load reduction. At the end of the fermentation process, all the skins are pressed in a basket and malolactic fermentation takes place spontaneously in barrels, using indigenous strains of bacteria from each single vineyard. All the wines of the winery are not clarified or filtered before bottling. Some of the more recent vintages of Château Toblet are 2002, 2001 and 1998.
