Agricola Vintners Ebenezer Shiraz 2022

The Powell family have been making award winning wines in the Barossa for decades. Now son Callum has released his on Barossa label. These wines are totally different to your usual big, bold reds of the Barrosa – lower alcohol, lo-fi, pure and elegant.

All wines spent 12 months in oak, with less than 10% of it being new oak. Flaxman and Kalimna tend to be in larger puncheons and demi-muid while Ebenezer and Theel’s Handfibel for the most part have been aged in barriques 225L. All wild fermented with no adds aside from some sulfur late in the process. Everything is 100% whole bunch and ferments for 3-4 weeks.

Ebenezer is the home of the Hoffmann family in the Northern Barossa Valley. This is the first vintage that Callum has been able to source a small section of the Hoffmann family’s Dallwitz Old plantings in Ebenezer. In addition to that, he’s been able to maintain his allocation of grapes from the Hoffmann’s Dimchurch Home Old vineyard, which is their original property from 1857. Callum’s family has worked with the Hoffmanns for nearly three decades so Callum calls the opportunity to work with this site is a “treasured sentiment.” Callum likes to use the comparison of two of Hermitage’s best vineyards to describe the differences between his Flaxman and Ebenezer Syrahs. He likens the Flaxman wine to Les Bessards, which has the bones (think savory, aromatic, lean tannins), and the Ebenezer wine to Le Meal, which has the flesh (think darker fruits, rounder, more gliding tannins).

The grapes were all harvested by hand on various picking dates and brought back to the cellar to ferment spontaneously as whole bunches in closed stainless steel tanks. After 3-4 weeks depending on the lot, the wine was pressed off the skins and racked to old puncheons and barriques, where it remained for 12 months of aging. At this point the lots were blended, and the wine went to the bottling line without fining or filtration and just a touch of sulfur.