The Auswine Forum

Scrimmaging around the cellar for something to open tonight finally led me to open my case of the 1998 Stonewell Shiraz. I’ve wanted to try one of these for a quite a while now given the fairly polarised opinions this wine.

A perfect cork escaped from the bottle without a trace of leakage, a good start. After the first swirl I noticed how it clung to the glass and crawled down like an octopus. A beautiful perfume filled the room. Heavy smells of coffee beans, vanilla sticks, chocolate and mocha, licorice and sweet oak were all very dominant. I immediately sensed this wine will have plenty of years ahead of it.

The taste is dusty and floral but with layers of purple plums and licorice flavours. A smooth finish, but not too complex, but yet this is a good wine. Will decant for a while and come back to notice the changes.

Decanted for 3 hrs and this wine has evolved a great deal. The floral flavours had all disappeared and a more concentrated earthy shiraz flavour had developed. This is a well structure wine, with balance and backbone. I like and believe it will continue to improve and soften over the years to produce a fine aged shiraz. 90 pts and will probably improve in 2 years

I agree totally Gianna. I'm a big fan of this wine, and the '99 is growing on me too. Plan to have one of these over Xmas at some point so I'll post my impressions.

Cheers,

I definitely agree with your assessment: Stonewell 1998 is rather structured, perhaps a bit backward at this stage. Should be excellent in 3-5 years. At this stage, I prefer the 1999 which has been really developing nicely.

I haven't had the 1998 Stonewell but I too am a fan of the 1999 version of he wine. Good Stonewells can go a long distance - I have been lucky enough to try some late eighties and early nineties vintages from a friends cellar which were showed well over the past few years.