“My old grandfather made and enjoyed wine for 80 years. He told me the soils in which the vines lived were a layer cake. He said, the wine, if properly made,was like a great layer cake, fruit, mocha, chocolate, and hints of spice — and rich, always rich. ’Never pass up a good Layer Cake,’ he would say. I have always loved those words.”

It has been a long time since we had a really good Australian Shiraz. The ones we kept trying in our price range were alcohol bombs with a ton of fruit and no subtly. We received Layer Cake 2008 Shiraz as a gift . . . and what a gift it was! This is a spectacular Shiraz that’s big, yet subtle at the same time. It, too, has a lot of alcohol (14.9%), but it’s so well managed it really doesn’t matter.

Nose: You can smell it from across the room — delicious. Lush dark fruit, earth, menthol, currants and mocha.

Taste: Huge and jammy, it “fills your mouth like a bushel of berries.” Earthy with loads of mocha and hints of oily leather. Delicious. The finish is like silk.

Food: We started small: smoked Gruyere. Wow! So smooth and so much delicious fruit with very balanced tannins and smokey cherries. We also tried the wine with fish tacos — excellent again. You would have to say that this wine would go best with grilled meats, hearty pastas and stews. We’d say it goes with almost anything that has good flavors.

Layer Cake has renewed our faith in Aussie Shiarz. It’s the best we’ve had in years.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 3:32 pm and is filed under WineNotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.