Wines
2023 RIKARD Riesling
Our 2023 RIKARD Riesling shows fruit driven and floral characters in the lime and citrus blossom spectrum. Dry, precise and pretty in youth, age worthy and complex underneath. Purity of acid and freshness is important, as is youthful drinkability.
Colour – Pale with yellow and green hues
Nose – An upfront hit of citrus, more in the cumquat and lime spectrum. Lime marmalade. There’s a myriad of fruit characters popping their head up – custard apple, golden kiwi and pears amongst them. A hint of dry hay, nettles and ginger
Palate – A spike of fresh acidity underlines the whole palate, tingling and lively. It’s overlaid with a generous, textural, mealy mid-palate. Some alcohol warmth and plenty of fruit weight carries on well into the back palate. Structure is prominent with pithy tannins holding the wine together and no doubt preserving it for many years to come. Lovely balance.
3225 in stock
Description
Our 2023 RIKARD Riesling aims to show fruit driven and floral characters, very much in the lime and citrus blossom spectrum. It is inspired by the cool-climate Rieslings produced along the Rhine Valley but with an inbuilt, distinctly Australian style. Dry, precise and pretty in their youth but age-worthy and complex underneath. Purity of acid and freshness is important, as is youthful drinkability. Barrel-fermentation and regular lees-stirring brings a textural feel in the mouth, and there’s enough phenolic structure to hold the wine together and have it pair nicely with food.
2023 was a long cool season – ideal for fine-boned, elegant and pretty styles of Riesling like our green label Riesling. Harvest was 4-6 weeks later than average and this allowed us the luxury of “hang-time” of fruit on the vine, resulting in a broad array of flavour spectrums and ripeness in our vineyards. Usually, we’d pick our fruit based on sugar ripeness and flavour, but in 2023 we enjoyed the luxury of basing our picking decisions upon acid ripeness. Basically, to pick the fruit when the acid had dropped enough to make the ideal wine. Whilst the weather held off and the vine canopy was healthy, this pushed the physiological ripeness beyond the usual citrus spectrum into a more sweet-smelling musk and stone fruit spectrum and gave us a better, fuller balance of flavour.
We were again very lucky to be able to source fruit from multiple vineyard sites and terroirs in 2023. Each of these sites are among the coolest in Orange and show differing characteristics to each other, adding complexity to the final wine. They also contain multiple different clones of Riesling, which for us this brings further complexity and blending options to the winemaking table. Add to that some variation in how we treat them in the winery, and you have multiple options and scope with which to “build” your wine and play around with style.
