red wines	tasting notes
2023 porco preto	we've been playing around up here at piggs peake with some new vineyards and some different winemaking techniques. touriga especially fascinates us and we have made it into a fortified wine, an ageing wine named pig schist, an early drinking red named pigs breath and now we are proud to release the porco preto!!! in this latest incarnation, touriga from different vineyards have been made in different ways (aged in tank, in small oak and in large oak) with a view to increasing the complexity of the final blend. some of the vineyards have contributed to the floral nose, others to the gentle mouthfeel while a trace amount of mclaren vale shiraz has brought it all together to make this very drinkable wine. try it in the medium term with char grilled beef skewers.
2023 boar sin	in 2023 we introduced three new chambourcin vineyards to the piggs peake portfolio. one in herons creek out the back of wauchope and two in broke. in the winemaking we kept the vineyards separate and then considered our blending options in october 2023. a subtle addition of mclaren vale shiraz has enriched the palate and created a new wine for us that we have named boar sin. in simple terms, it’s a super premium chambourcin. its pretty good! on the nose it’s a mixture of raspberry fruit and coconut while the palate is deep and brooding while still being soft and approachable. try this wine with richly flavoured red meat dishes.
2022 trevor mctin pig shiraz	trevor is the name of our premium hunter valley shiraz. its not a wine made every year. we always want to see a depth of colour and a concentration of flavour from the vintage before we assign this label to it. the hunters reputation for shiraz was historically based on elegant, medium bodied shiraz's with ageing ability. that pretty much sums up trevor. this wine has a brambly berry nose with hints of vanilla oak. the palate is firm with dusty tannins. a perfect accompaniment to a medium rare steak.
2022 happy as shiraz	the fruit for this wine was grown in the mudgee region, a few hundred kilometres north west of the hunter valley. mudgee is further inland and as a result has a more continental climate, i.e. theres a bigger difference between day and night temperatures. the hunter is relatively close to the coast, so we see more even temperatures. in 2022 the mudgee vintage went pretty much to script. the fruit was vibrant and deeply coloured. we made it into wine and then looked at how to incorporate it into our house of straw, sticks and bricks range. basically, it defied being blended. we always investigate blending wines and more often than not find a way to improve a wine by doing so. but, sometimes a wine just has a uniqueness that is only diminished by blending it. and so it was for the happy as shiraz. the decision was made to simply bottle it as is, so you can see how good the 2022 mudgee vintage was. mudgee shiraz isn’t hugely different to hunter shiraz. it's medium bodied and matches well with tender cuts of beef cooked medium rare.
2022 house of bricks shiraz	the house of bricks range are piggs peake's big reds. these are wines designed to hold nothing back. expect lots of big coconut and coffee oak flavours and aromas, as well as blackberry jam on the palate. while these wines are great fun to drink young, someone into cellaring might want to try them at about 6 years of age. try this with a well seared and properly rested rump steak.
2022 house of bricks grenache/shiraz/viognier	this is a fascinating wine. typically, when someone does a blend that starts with grenache shiraz it ends with mataro (also known as mouvedre). grenache can be a bit light as a stand alone wine, so shiraz is used to bolster it and the tannic mataro provides structure and support. our grenache vineyard, however, isn’t a shy flower. it’s a powerhouse planted back in 1897. the training and pruning of the vines has resulted in a much smaller grenache grape with intensity of both flavour and colour, such that we don’t need mataro to bolster it up, we need viognier to tame it down. this is a perfect wine to accompany a game dish such as duck or venison.
2022 pork hunt	the unfortunately named pork hunt is one of our big reds. a shiraz just too big to go into the house of bricks range. this happens every now and then, that a batch catches our eye as something special and gets pulled out of our main blending. it’s always exciting when it happens and these monster reds are sure to please those that enjoy the big stuff. try this wine relatively youthful, say the first 4 years, with a slow cooked chunk of brisket.
2022 deliverance	deliverance is our top shiraz. we pick shiraz in february, march and april of each year and then in october we line up the wines we have made and we grade them. if something makes us go 'wow', we have a chat about putting it under the deliverance label. this is a wine that stops people in their tracks when they do a tasting in cellar door. it commands attention. drink it relatively young, say the first 4 years, with osso bucco on a cold winters night.