Gnadenfrei Estate 2002 St Michaels Shiraz Aug 05 Brian picked up some at auction for a ridiculously low price and gave me a bottle so try which had been sitting on shelf for a few weeks. Loaded with youthful, spicy aromas the bouquet certainly let me know there was a mass of good fruit backing it. A solid, full-bodied wine, with sufficient fine, drying tannins to handle the massive quantity of deeply-seated pure fruit, the finish is long and persistent. It is still tight and will benefit from four more years in the bottle. Choco-o-block full of dark fruit flavours, there is nothing over-ripe about this black wine. It goes close to pushing the envelope in every respect, but it stays on the right side of the border. Rated as Highly Recommended (I have no idea of the retail price,) I have to find out more about this producer, this wine even in this youthful state is bloody enjoyable. (I am going to forget this chapter for now, time to cook dinner and enjoy a real bottle of wine.) After a couple of hours of airtime, my thoughts on this wine changed. Whilst I was initially very impressed with the amount of fruit they had packed into the wine, as the wine gained air and metamorphosised, the tannins became very hard, leading me to believe that the wine had been too heavily extracted. The rating after a few hours would have been dropped to Recommended. It would be interesting to see this wine in four years, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was hard.

 

I emailed the winery to find out the price; the 2002 is long gone and the 2003 is almost sold out and the 2004 will be released as soon as the 2003 is all gone. Oh, the price? $40 which makes it marginal value in my book.