Our Tapalinga Shiraz has flavours of blueberry, raspberries and ripe cherries, and savoury flavours a bit like fragrant white pepper, oregano and thyme. The delicious berry flavours are balanced by grainy textured tannins, and the addition of malbec gives this wine a luscious smooth finish! This is one of our best selling wines at cellar door, and it might become your favourite too. This wine is unpretentious in style and drinking beautifully now. It is refined and elegant in style, and it will age for a number of years too.

Margaret River - The Shiraz and Malbec grapes come from two different Margaret River vineyards, the Tapalinga Vineyard in Cowaramup, and the Knotting Hill vineyard in Metricup.

As we make 4 different shiraz wines, the style we are aiming for with the Tapalinga Shiraz is to create a wine which is easy drinking, with velvety tannins and more layers of flavours coming from the portion of shiraz that has matured in oak barrels for 18 months, and from the Malbec which is added in.
We ferment our reds in open topped fermenters, with alternating hand plunging, followed by draining off skins into a tank, then returning onto skins with lots of splashing and aeration which assist with extracting as much colour and flavour as possible from the skins. After 7 to 10 fermenting on skins, the wine is pressed into tank using a basket press. About 50% of it is matured in a mix of oak barrels of different ages, with the other 50% being matured in tank with oak boards. The Malbec is blended in when preparing the Tapalinga Shiraz for bottling. This wine is a blend of 92% shiraz and 8% malbec.

Tapalinga Shiraz is one of our small batch wines. The grapes are grown on a friend's vineyard in Cowaramup, and their vineyard and farm is called Tapalinga Homestead. The word itself originates from the first nations people in the Tiwi Islands, where the name 'Tapalinga' refers to a star, or group of stars in the night sky.

This wine has a elegant structure and savoury flavours. The tannins are softer and not as big and powerful in comparison to the Barossa Shiraz wines that Cathy used to make at St Hallett. Keeping that in mind, the recommendation is to pair with dishes of similar texture and similar focus on savouriness. Using our wine sensory garden affinity beds as inspiration, flavours pairings are Italian herb mixes like basil, oregano, and thyme, and also sumac, juniper berries, fennel, chervil, and Tasmanian pepper leaf and pepper berries. Dishes with tomato, squash, white beans, eggplant and radicchio.