This week Tony Love published an excellent deep dive into the sparkling wines of the Adelaide Hills in InDaily (you can read the full article here), in which he reviewed our Natural Réserve.
DAOSA Natural Réserve
“This is denoted specifically Piccadilly Valley on the label, referring to several vineyard sites owned or managed by Xavier Bizot in his preferred area of the Hills. The finest of sparkling wines can come from the most skilled blending of varieties and vintages, as happens here: a 72:28 mix of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, 84% from the 2019 vintage with reserve wines from 2018 and 2017 making up the rest. This provides judicious complexities in a light tonic mode: white crunchy strawberry fruit tang along with fresh ripe lemons and limes from the high-altitude Chardonnay. Two years in the bottle to settle and knit encourages a fine mousse in the glass while delivering hyper refreshment to the palate. This has plenty of flavour as well, an adult lemonade yet moreishly dry drinking. It’s available in magnum as well, while a higher-end DAOSA Blanc de Blancs 2017 ($90) is seriously good as well.” – Tony Love.
Tony also quotes extensively from DAOSA vigneron Xavier Bizot in the article.
“One of the region’s most ardent sparkling advocates, Xavier Bizot, agrees that there is a genuine culture of fine traditional-method wines from the Hills.
His DAOSA label has two styles, a Natural Reserve Pinot Noir/ Chardonnay blend and a current release 2017 Blanc de Blancs, both of which are indicative of the prowess of the Piccadilly Valley in making world-class sparklings.
“There is a real movement now,” Bizot says. “We have good drinkable wines from the transfer method in the Hills, but when you strive for excellence, you need to go to the traditional method.
“It is a forever expanding culture here, and there’s a massive opportunity to continue to improve as vines gain more age and the wines have more time to develop.
A passionate resident of Piccadilly Valley, he too supports the notion that the district’s sparkling wines are unique in their fruit expression, which makes them an attractive proposition in the marketplace.
“The Piccadilly Valley has a long history of making sparklings, and we have an advantage to be able to sell that story,” he says.
“We are a cool climate in Piccadilly, but we are also warmer than Champagne, so we can get some extra ripeness which gives us more flavour – in Pinot more strawberry characters and for Chardonnay you get more generous stone fruit flavours.
“What we can do in the Hills is blend the varieties, blend clones and vineyards with different altitude and aspects, and in Piccadilly Valley alone it’s wetter and cooler than elsewhere and we have different soils and all the different aspects.
“It’s fantastic – all of that makes it a great playground for sparkling winemaking.” ”
“A deep dive into the sparkling wines of the Adelaide Hills” by Tony Love. InDaily, December 2021
