Clarendon Hills Astralis Syrah 2011

96+ / 100

Robert Parker, The Wine Advocate

The deep garnet-purple 2011 Astralis offers a nose redolent of Christmas pudding, allspice, mocha and anise along with a lovely core of prunes, black cherry preserves and dusty earth. Medium to full-bodied, it fills the mouth with elegant, effortless fruit, with a medium level of finely grained tannins, just enough acidity, and a long and multi-layered finish

Clarendon Hills Astralis Syrah vineyard was discovered by Roman Bratasiuk in 1990. He didn’t have much in the way of winery resources in those days so he picked the vineyard by hand and stayed up that night crushing the fruit in a bucket with an empty Burgundy bottle. It was grassroots stuff and as rustic as you could imagine. But the wines were excellent and he sold out year on year and created a little winery that made small amounts of single vineyard expressions from very special old vine patches throughout Blewitt Springs, McLaren Vale. Across the first vintages 1990 to 1993 the wine was titled ‘Clarendon Hills Shiraz’ however in 1994 the wine was rebranded to Clarendon Hills Astralis Shiraz off the back of his belief this wine was out of this world. Astralis 1994 was in fact Australia’s first $100 bottle of wine and it was adorned in a black 360 ˚ label peppered with golden stars to emphasise the definition of Astralis “pertaining to the stars'”. It was a thing of beauty.