Some more gongs for the trophy cabinet.....

What a great start to the wine show season for Thomas Wines. Here's a snapshot of our recent award-winning wines...

2023 Hunter Valley Wine Show
Trophy - 2021 Sweetwater Shiraz (Best Two year Old Shiraz)
Gold - 2021 Sweetwater Shiraz
Gold - 2021 Elenay Shiraz
Gold - 2021 Kiss Shiraz
Gold - 2019 Elenay Shiraz
Gold - 2013 Braemore Semillon

2023 NSW Small Winemakers Show
Trophy - 2017 Cellar Reserve Braemore Semillon (Best Mature Semillon)
Trophy - 2018 Elenay Shiraz (Best Mature Shiraz)
Gold - 2017 Cellar Reserve Braemore Semillon
Gold - 2018 Elenay Shiraz
Gold - 2021 Elenay Shiraz

2023 Winewise Small Vignerons Awards
The Len Sorbello Trophy - 2023 The OC Semillon (Best Young Semillon)
Gold - 2023 The OC Semillon
Gold - 2017 Cellar Reserve Braemore Semillon
Gold - 2021 Elenay Shiraz

Huon Hooke on Braemore Semillon

A nice article by Huon Hooke (The Real Review) on the Iconic Braemore vineyard following a recent vertical tasting

https://www.therealreview.com/2023/08/30/andrew-thomas-and-his-/braemore-passion

Thommo's Selection Shiraz Pack Video - September 2023

Here are the wines included in your September 2023 Shiraz pack.

 

 

2021 Two of a Kind Shiraz (2 bottles)
2021 Synergy Shiraz
2021 Sweetwater Shiraz (2 bottles)
2021 The Dam Block Shiraz

We hope you enjoy the wines, and thank you for your continued support

Thommo's Selection Mixed Pack Video - September 2023

Here are the wines included in your September 2023 Mixed pack.

2023 Synergy Semillon
2023 Fordwich Hill Semillon
2023 Braemore Semillon
2021 Two of a Kind Shiraz
2021 Synergy Shiraz
2021 Sweetwater Shiraz

We hope you enjoy the wines, and thank you for your continued support

Thommo's Selection Semillon Pack Video - September 2023

Here are the wines included in your September 2023 Semillon pack.

2023 Synergy Semillon (2 bottles)
2023 Two of a Kind SSB
2023 Fordwhich Hill Semillon
2023 The OC Semillon
2023 Braemore Semillon

We hope you enjoy the wines, and thank you for your continued support

2021 Shiraz virtual tasting

Thomas Wines full range of 2021 Shiraz was officially released on Saturday 13th May 2023. 

Join winemaker Andrew Thomas and co-host Mike Bennie as they taste through the wines during an online 'virtual tasting' the evening prior to the official release day

Here's a link to the recording of the tasting

https://youtu.be/wFe5GI4o61c

 

Thomas Wines 2021 Shiraz release

I am very excited to announce the highly anticipated official release of our full range of 2021 vintage Shiraz, Saturday 13th May.

After the disappointment of a significantly reduced production from the 2020 vintage, I’m pleased to report that we are back to the (almost) full suite of all our favourite labels this year. I’ve provided a brief summary of my thoughts on the 2021 vintage, as well as links to some information on all the new vintage wines below.

For those of you who like a ‘sneak preview’ of our wines prior to release, we have organised a series of nine “shiraz-amatazz’ events around the country, starting in Newcastle on the 27th April and concluding in Pokolbin on the official release date 13th May.

Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane – we’ve also got you covered, and the chefs at each venue have designed a fantastic menu to perfectly complement the wines.

If you can’t get to one of our dinners, we also have a virtual tasting via zoom (with specially prepared 100mL samples of each wine delivered to your door) set down for Friday 12th May. My good mate Mike Bennie will be again joining me as co-host to discuss the vintage and the wines.

I look forward to seeing you at one of our events, online or next time you visit our Cellar Door.

Cheers,
Thommo
 

After four consecutive years of drought, the skies certainly opened up from about February/March 2020, delivering 1050mm of rain during the 2020 calendar year which is well over our 760mm long-term average. With bud bust pretty much on cue (last week of August), it was of the utmost importance to be diligent with vineyard management to ward off any
potential issues with downy/powdery/botrytis through the growing season right through to harvest.

If ever there was a vintage to keep an eye on potential crop levels, 2021 was it. Most of the vineyards from which we source our Shiraz are quite mature and naturally low yielding, however after four years of drought the vines seemed to spring back into action setting a higher than normal crop. To make sure we gave ourselves the very best chance of getting all our Shiraz ripe there was some significant crop thinning around halfway through verasion (first week of January).

The final ripening stage (January/February) is the most critical period during the viticultural growing season in the Hunter, and I am happy to report that we seriously 'dodged a bullet' with the rain backing off significantly, allowing a window of opportunity to get our fruit to an excellent level of phenological ripeness and in great condition.

Stylistically, the 2021 reds have a more ‘gentle feel’ than the previous few warm and dry vintages. The wines sit nicely in the middle of the medium-bodied spectrum – think Hunter River Burgundy with a contemporary twist. One of the things I love about wine is the ‘light and shade’ that the different vintages/seasons provide. The stylistic stamp of the wines produced each vintage tells a story of the season, and I love the bright, aromatic vibrancy and savoury texture of these wines.

When I look at this range of 2021 reds as a group, I am absolutely delighted with the way they have shaped up. Whilst I like to take some of the credit, it is really the outstanding pedigree vineyards, that I am fortunate enough to have in our portfolio, that give these wines their unique quality stamp year after year. Bottled in May/June last year and now having nearly 12 months resting in bottle, each wine displays its own individual/stylistic personality that we know and love, and I am confident that you will be equally impressed.

The wine show results and accolades received so far will give you an indication of how we’ve done with this new vintage, and I could not be more delighted with this suite of wines.

Full disclosure, we did have a couple of casualties… Unfortunately whilst we did pick The Cote in 2021, the wine just did not come up to the quality standard we have come to expect from this vineyard, and was declassified to Two of a Kind and Synergy Shiraz. Likewise, The Trevena Shiraz (DJV) suffered some downy mildew during the growing season and did not have the canopy to ripen the fruit adequately, and we unfortunately deemed this block a write-off in 2021.

So there we have it. A season that was looking quite “challenging” to say the least, has evolved into what history will remember as a pretty bloody good Hunter Shiraz vintage....

For some information and tasting notes on each of the seven new 2021 Shiraz releases, please click on the links below.

2021 Kiss Shiraz
2021 Elenay Shiraz
2021 Sweetwater Shiraz
2021 The Dam Block Shiraz
2021 Belford Shiraz
2021 Synergy Shiraz
2021 Two of a Kind Shiraz

Three New Spring Releases - 1st September 2022

With the weather starting to show some signs of spring in the air, I am delighted to announce three new wines all officially due for release on 1st September 2022.

The latest vintage installment of our Cellar Reserve Braemore program, our inaugural Semillon Chardonnay blend, and the 2022 vintage release of our ‘Like a Version’ Braemore Semillon.

2016 Cellar Reserve Braemore Semillon

Having sold out of our 2015 CR Braemore Semillon a few months ago, I am very excited to see the next vintage hit our shelves on the first day of Spring. We do particularly enjoy the opportunity to present both our current vintage release and bottle-aged Braemore Semillon side by side for our guests in Cellar Door.

Having been sitting quietly for just over six years in our climate-controlled cellar (15⁰C), the 2016 Braemore has just started to emerge with those toasty complexities that we know and love, but still displays extraordinary freshness and vibrancy. It’s sitting in a window that provides excellent current drinking, but will continue to evolve with some further cellaring over the next 5-15+ years.

As one of our valued Wine Club members, you get ‘first dibs' on any of our new releases, and with only 495 six packs available, I suspect this vintage will also sell out relatively quickly.

The wine has been well received/reviewed on both the Wine Companion and The Real Review websites, with both reviewers awarding 96 points

“An exquisite wine that suggests the style here was finer boned and less overt of fruit, in the past. Barley water, lemon oil and a strong waft of peat, not dissimilar to great champagne or Laphroaig. Lightweight and skeletal, yet of immense thrust, intensity of extract, drive and length. A bit tangy, to be churlish. Nevertheless, an indomitable wine worthy of much attention”
96 Points
Ned Goodwin MW, James Halliday Wine Companion

“Really youthful in appearance, mid-straw colour, looking smart for six years of age. Lifted, layered and complex aromas of lemon butter, toast, lemon pith, mineral and wet-stone. Still fresh and lively, with lashings of lemon, grapefruit, nuttiness and crunchy, mouth-watering acidity. Just beginning its journey. Impressive stuff.”
96 Points
Aaron Brasher, The Real Review
 

2022 Vat 32 Semillon Chardonnay

Yes, that’s not a misprint.
We’ve made a Semillon/Chardonnay blend for the very first time…..
Some background to explain.

As you would expect with a vineyard that was planted way back in 1969, some gaps and missing vines have appeared over the years in the Braemore vineyard. At some stage during the last 50 years, these gaps were replanted with whatever vines were available at the time, and it’s now apparent that some of these gaps were filled in with Chardonnay cuttings.

We are in the process of marking and removing/replacing these ‘rogue’ vines, but during the 2022 vintage we went through the whole vineyard and hand-picked these marked vines separately and fermented them as a batch in four brand new French oak hogsheads. The wine spent three months in barrel before blending with a classically styled parcel of Semillon we made from the Brycefield vineyard over on the Lovedale side of the Valley.

Initially, the oak was quite punchy/overt in the blend, but with time prior to and post bottling, that oak has folded nicely into the wine and now provides just some beautiful background complexity.

For those of you who have loved and bought Tyrrell’s Vat 63 Chardonnay Semillon over the years, this wine is also for you. It might also give a little insight into my naming of the wine….. 

Only 270 dozen bottled.
This wine is probably a one-off, but then again, maybe not.
I'm not sure yet. Watch this space…….
 

2022 ‘Like a Version’ Braemore Semillon

This is the third installment of our ‘Like a Version’ Braemore Semillon concept, which each year has been made by a guest winemaker with a simple brief to produce a left field/wacky/cover version of our more classically styled Braemore Semillon.

Essentially, it’s an exploration into the world of minimal input ‘natural’ wines using grapes from one of the Hunter Valley’s most iconic Semillon vineyards. Inviting a guest winemaker each year allows me to ‘dip my toes’ in the water, without getting wet (if you get my drift…)

The 2022 vintage is a collaboration between my son Daniel and our good mate Oliver Margan from Margan Family Wines. Trust me here, this wine is bloody good and without doubt the best LAV yet.

Fruit from our last pick was destemmed with the whole berries returned to a fermenter where they sat under inert gas cover for four days. During this time a spontaneous fermentation started with the indigenous yeasts present. The grapes were then pressed and back-blended with 50% bright juice from one of our normal Braemore parcels. The wild yeast carried on and completed the fermentation. Racked twice during the post-fermentation stage and then bottled without any finings.

The resulting wine has a brightness and vibrancy (that was arguably lacking over the last two releases) but is also certainly a more open-framed, textural, and quite compelling expression of Semillon from this pedigree Hunter Valley vineyard.

For those of you who didn’t love the previous vintage releases of ‘Like a Version’ I strongly suggest you revisit here, as tasting this wine alongside our classic Braemore Semillon provides an absolutely fascinating comparison.

Only 160 dozen bottled.

Bringing back some gems from the Vault….

I’ll admit I was a tad nervous at the time, but today my intuition seems to have made sense..

We’ve been blessed with some outstanding vintages in recent years (think 2017-2019), and you may recall I put the ‘sold out’ shingle on a few of our top shelf wines a little earlier than normal. With relatively good volumes produced in these highly regarded vintages, I decided to put away a few parcels with the view to re-releasing them with a bit of bottle age.

These wines have been quietly maturing in my climate controlled cellar at a constant 15 degrees, and will be re-released over the next 12 months effectively filling in some gaps with our significantly reduced offering from the 2020 Shiraz release.

We have included three of these back vintage wines in the preloaded Member's Selection and Priority Selection Members default packs for May;

• 2018 Sweetwater Shiraz
• 2017 Elenay Shiraz
• 2018 Kiss Shiraz

Some other wines that you may wish to secure (by customising your selection) include;

• 2019 Elenay Shiraz
• 2018 Elenay Shiraz
• 2017 The Cote Shiraz

We also have some (very limited) stocks of 2019 Dam Block and 2019 Belford remaining for those of you that need to top up on these before they sell out.

If you plan on visiting our Cellar Door in the next few months, keep your eye out for a new tasting that we will be introducing – the ‘Focus on Shiraz’ Vertical Tasting. We will be presenting a vertical tasting of Sweetwater, The Cote, Elenay and Kiss Shiraz across a few (all awesome) vintages. Some of these re-releases are in tiny quantities and a couple of the wines will be available to members only (2017 Kiss Shiraz and 2018 The Cote).
Watch this space…..

Lastly, if our Semillons are more your bag, then you can be the first to get your hands on our 2022 Braemore Semillon. This wine is not even bottled as I write this, but will be released around the end of May and is available for selection in your May members pack.

We’ve also included the recently released 2022 Synergy Semillon as an option. This stunning, great value for money every day drinking Hunter Semillon is already running out the door.

So, at the end of the day, despite a relatively limited offering from 2020 Shiraz, it seems you are actually spoilt for choice with your May members pack. I sincerely hope you enjoy putting your selection together….

Cheers,

Thommo
 

Let's make Hay while the Sun Shines

Two new single vineyard Shiraz releases

The Hunter Valley has been blessed with three outstanding vintages in a row (2017 – 2019). Having lived and worked through (thankfully) not too many, but a few terrible red vintages in my time here (think 2008 and 2012), I have taken the approach that we should “make hay while the sun shines”, and look to purchase some extra fruit from high quality vineyards in the great years so that we have some reserve stock on hand in the event of a season that did not quite deliver on expectations.

Just prior to the 2019 vintage I was fortunate to secure two small parcels of fruit from two great vineyards, Herlestone and Wills Hill. With the season already potentially shaping up to be another ripper, I of course jumped at the opportunity.

From a winemaker’s point of view, there’s an excitement delving into the unknown, making wine from a vineyard with which you have no personal or intimate history, but the potential is intoxicating. Will they be good enough to bottle as a single vineyard Hunter Shiraz? Where will they sit in terms of our existing range?

These vineyards did not disappoint.

At the end of the day we bottled each as a single vineyard wine, however they did not quite fit in terms of stylistic diversity within our existing range of 2019 single vineyard Shiraz, so chose to hold them for a future release. With an extra 12 months bottle age these two wines are looking right in that sweet spot and ready to go.

Stylistically, both these wines sit somewhere between our Déjà vu Shiraz and Sweetwater, in terms of their weight. Typical of all our 2019 vintage releases, these wines are ripe, yet have a slightly more gentle structure than the more muscular 2017 and 2018 vintage wines.

Here’s a snapshot of both wines, the tasting notes delivered by my partner Kim Bickley, who during her career as a sommelier has certainly developed a nice way with words….

2019 Herlestone Shiraz

Planted in 1968, the Herlestone vineyard was the core source of some of the best Rothbury Estate Shiraz releases during the late 70’s early 80’s under the tenure of the late great Len Evans. Planted on red basalt soil, this block is situated adjacent to Mount Pleasant’s Rosehill vineyard on the eastern side of Wine Country Drive in Pokolbin with a sharp south east facing aspect, essentially protecting the vines from the harsh afternoon sun.

Hand-picked on 13th February 2019, the wine was destemmed but not crushed in an attempt to liberate the bright red fruit characters during fermentation, without too much tannin extraction. Maturation in third and fourth use French oak hogsheads has paid respect to the fruit. 275 dozen bottled

“Bright medium ruby colour, expressive nose of black and blue fruits, exotic spices, espresso, hazelnut and hints of tea-smoke. The palate is classically medium bodied and flavoursome with a seductively silky with fine grain tannin structure around a core of fresh blueberries, red plum and mulberry fruit. There’s flavours of Christmas spices, gingerbread, mocha and fresh black pepper. This is a youthful and vibrant wine with intensity of flavour and harmonious structure, it is long and layered and will continue to develop complexities for years to come.”

2019 Wills Hill Shiraz

Originally planted by Joe Lesnik on his Black Creek property, the Wills Hill vineyard is situated opposite the intersection of Wine Country Drive and Broke Road, in Pokolbin. This gently sloping block sits on red basalt soil, yet naturally yields a relatively small crop contributing to its internal concentration and structural complexity.

Machine harvested during the cool night hours of 14th February, this wine was handled a little more aggressively than the Herlestone Shiraz during fermentation, revealing a slightly deeper core of fruit weight and tannins. Some newer French oak maturation resulted in three hogsheads finding their way into our 2019 Elenay Shiraz barrel select blend. 295 dozen bottled

“Bright medium ruby colour and an intricate nose filled with hints of black fruits, exotic spices and deluxe oak. There’s an elaborate palate of juicy blackberry, dark plum and black cherry fruit alongside hints of liquorice, fresh coffee, black pepper and cinnamon. The wine is fleshy and silky with a fine-grained tannin structure, and excellent length of palate. Delicious to drink now but will cellar beautifully.”

These two 2019 Individual Vineyard Shiraz will be available via our website and Cellar Door from Saturday 14 May, 2022.