Farmers Leap Fortune Shiraz, Padthaway

Description

Farmers Leap Fortune Shiraz is the estate’s flagship red wine from the Padthaway wine-growing region of Australia. The fruit is sourced from a few, specially selected small sites in the vineyard.

Farmers Leap Wines was established by third generation Padthaway farmers Scott Longbottom and Cheryl Merrett. They began planting vines in Padthaway in 1995 on the family property. Today there are plantings, mainly, of Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Merlot. To begin with most of the fruit was sold on to other wine producers but, as time has gone by, and with increased success of the Farmers Leap label, more and more fruit is destined for their own label. Today there are over 400 hectares of vineyards planted and farmed alongside the family’s sheep, cattle and onion crops.

The Padthaway wine-growing region is located in the inland centre of the Limestone Coast in South Australia some 155 miles to the south of Adelaide. The climate here is Mediterranean and the soils are rich, terra rossa over limestone (similar to Coonawarra to south). The region is probably best known for red wine production and Padthaway Shiraz has always been particularly well-regarded.

The Shiraz fruit for the Farmers Leap Fortune Shiraz is electively harvested from a few small sections of vineyard within the larger block / vineyard site. The sites are selected for visual balance of canopy to
fruit, berry size and uniformity as well as flavour and tannin balance in tasting the fruit. The soils here are brown loam over limestone. The wine was fermented on skins for 10 days and pressed at dryness
before being transferred to 100% French barrels for a maturation of 22 months. The barrels used were mixture new large format fine grain puncheons and older fine grain barriques.

Only 6000 bottles of Farmers Leap Fortune Shiraz 2013 produced.