South Australian Outre Petit Verdot 2016

About The Wine

This South Australian Petit Verdot 2016 shows a superbly rounded and full, yet pleasingly supple, structure. This wine has a deceptively full-weighted palate and a well-integrated oak complexity that enhances and balances the intense fruit characters. While young this wine exhibits varietal dried flower, herb and violet notes, however, with age there is the potential for extraordinary complexity with the development of interesting tobacco leaf and black olive characters.

Comments from Wine Buyer Steve

I love Petit Verdot! This name never does it justice as it is a full bodied, bold and heavy wine. This one is oozing bold flavours of black olive and dark forest berries and better still it has 4 years under its belt so its smooth with soft tannin. A great full-bodied red worthy of our Outré brand and a suburb price at $15.00 a bottle.

My Score – 92/100 – WACC Silver Medal.

Wine Making technique

The quality of the fruit lent itself to extended skin contact for optimum extraction of colour, so after crushing the fruit was fermented on skins in temperature-controlled stainless steel for between ten and twelve days.  The depth of fruit flavour and bold tannin structure achieved meant that from the beginning this wine was built to last.  Fermentation was completed in an assortment of oak and stainless steel, with French and American oak staves, hogshead and barriques used.

About the producer:

The producer of this 2016 Petit Verdot has a long association with the region and a strong family connection to the area. The winery produces some of the best wines in the country and has been consistently rated 5 stars by James Halliday in his wine companion.

To consistently achieve the highest quality fruit, the latest pruning, canopy management and other vineyard practices are undertaken to ensure optimum varietal expression from each harvest. As a core element of their philosophy, the winery endeavours to employ a “minimal intervention” approach to weed and pest control.

What is Petit Verdot?  

Petit Verdot (“peh-tee vur-doe”) is a full-bodied red wine that originates in southwestern France (in Bordeaux). It is highly desired as a blending grape in red Bordeaux blends because of its plentiful color, tannin and floral aromas of violet. Because Petit Verdot is such a bold wine, it is commonly added in less than 10% of most wine blends. The wine is also rarely produced as a single-varietal wine, however there are several producers making phenomenal Petit Verdot wines in regions within Australia, Chile, Spain, California and Washington State.

Great Petit Verdot wines offer up ethereal aromas of plum, lilac, violet and sage with gravel-like minerality. The characters to look for in varietal wines are its intense colours, the wonderful fragrant nose, rich flavours and soft tannins. they are also much better with a few years of bottle age.