Zema Estate 2005 Shiraz May08

Tasting Note

Sydney Time

Zema Estate 2005 Shiraz May08 sells the $20 at cellar door and is sealed under cork. The bouquet was initially broody but it opened up to show signs of sweet fruit with spicy notes together with black fruit characters and a hint of licorice. The palate is not at all sweet, it's very savoury and the flavour profile most enjoyable. The strong fruit delivers pleasant, plummy fruit, loads and aniseed, vanilla, spice and the excellent intensity finishes a very long. It's a muscular-weight supple wine with a solid structure and is probably in a hole at the moment. After 24 hours it was way better and had opened to show its true character. Drink from 2012 to 2016, it's rated as Recommended with *** for value, but the rating should improve as it enters its peak drinking window.

That's the good news. The bad news, and it would be remiss of me not to mention it, is that I'm concerned about the batch of corks that has been used to seal this wine. Zema always sends two samples in case there is a problem with the first. In this case, both samples of Shiraz were corked. What made me more concerned was when I spotted another reviewer who describe this wine as “lacking freshness and charm.” That would have described the second bottle opened to a tee, which I thought was suffering from low level cork taint. However, the good bottle was a far better and certainly didn't lack freshness or charm.