Hillcrest Vineyard - Village Cab Sauvignon 2010
As our pre-sales marketing work continues, we are carefully selecting appropriate quality wine merchants and restaurants where we would like to see #Cloud9 offered for sale. While we were dining at the amazing Tender Trap restaurant in Doncaster East three weeks back, owner Chris Moriatis invited us to try a bottle of Hillcrest Vineyards 2008 Cab Sauvignon from the Yarra Valley. By the way, Tender Trap stocks a lot of different hard to find high quality wines – we love that!
Our host explained a little bit about the “boutique” nature of Hillcrest and that was clearly evident in the wine. The colour was a stunning blackcurrant red colour with a simply gorgeous fruit filled nose. The concentration of great fruit stood out in the body and although the wine is still very young, the strong tannic finish did not detract from the overall class of this lovely product. We had to follow up and see what had inspired this magic!
Our luck was in! A visit to Hillcrest’s web site not only invited us to their “one day of the year” Cellar Open Door but immediately highlighted their philosophy of low yields and emphasis on very high quality, built around a project over ten years to recover and rejuvenate their vineyards from excessive treatment with herbicides and pesticides. Their total production of Premium wines is about 5000 bottles per annum.
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Hillcrest Winery - micro vats
At the Cellar Door, it was a privilege to meet the owners Tanya and David Bryant, to see their mini fermentation vats, to listen and (too briefly) discuss their whole philosophy (and to reflect on how close it is to ours!) and to take away further inspiration for the future of Paradise Rescued. It was also a really interesting experience to taste their earlier vintages and compare them to their 2010 wines and see the enormous progress they have made. I absolutely loved their 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon and particularly their silky smooth early drinking brilliant Merlot – a bottle of which is already in the wine case heading to our team in Bordeaux as a reference for what we might like to achieve from the new Hourcat Centre block.
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Hillcrest - the Chateau
Thank you and congratulations Tanya and David. I hope we can talk again soon in the future. The second bottle of your Merlot that we bought will be on the table here next weekend as our reference point when we double check our 2010 #Cloud9 #CabFranc to confirm that it is ready for sale. What an exciting week ahead![/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]