Ochota Barrels 2014 McLaren Vale The Fugazi Vineyard Grenache - Wine & Spirits Magazine

Wine Reviews

Ochota Barrels 2014 McLaren Vale The Fugazi Vineyard Grenache

review by Joshua Greene • September 23, 2016

Leading up to our Top 100 in San Francisco, our critics are sharing some favorite wines that will be poured at the event. We’re posting a new note each day through October 10th.

Join us at the Top 100 Tasting in San Francisco on October 10th to taste this wine. Grab your tickets today!

Taras and Amber Ochota focus on single-site grenache from McLaren Vale and syrah from Barossa. For this wine, they hand-harvest the fruit from 66-year-old vines in Blewitt Springs, allowing it a seven-day cold soak before it starts fermenting without added yeasts. They then leave the juice on the skins for 82 days before aging it in old oak barrels. In the end, they’ve captured a joyous grenache, a bright, floral red with fresh scents of roses and rosemary. The structure is more powerful than the scent might lead you to believe, sneaking up as the strawberry fruit races by, leaving a roar of tannins in its wake. Delicious now, especially if you splash it around a decanter, this wine’s structure and energy suggest it will only gain with time in bottle.

Joshua Greene

Joshua Greene is the editor and publisher of Wine & Spirits magazine.

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David joined Wine & Spirits in 2021 after immersing himself in the world of wine at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally from Boston, he graduated from Boston University with a degree in English and completed a master’s degree in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College in 2021. Prior to working at the magazine, he served as an editor and staff writer for the music blog Sound of Boston and worked in scientific publishing. Aside from wine, he loves basketball, arguing about Taylor Swift’s best album, and everything Greta Gerwig touches.

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Corey Warren moved to New York in 2015—fifteen years too late to join The Strokes—after earning a degree at Cornell in Comparative Literature. He started polishing glasses at Betony and threw himself into the restaurant world. Later, while a captain at Aquavit, he began working part time in the Wine & Spirits tasting department. Now, in addition to running tastings, he serves as critic for the wines of the Loire, Southern France, Argentina and South Africa. Corey likes almost anything bubbly, from Miller High Life, the Champagne of beers, to Champagne, the Champagne of Champagne, but he’ll drink anything once, and loves finding unique wines.

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Editor and Publisher of Wine & Spirits since 1986, Joshua Greene began drinking wine with meals during a summer in Galicia, Spain, at the age of 13. In later years, he worked in wine shops in western Massachusetts and served as wine captain at Wheatleigh, a small inn in Lenox. After graduating from Princeton University in 1981, Greene pursued a career in magazines, focusing on the management of special-interest publications. His work with Wine & Spirits began on a consulting basis, eventually leading to his purchase of the magazine in 1989.

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After graduating with a degree in journalism from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Patricio Tapia attended Bordeaux University in France, where he studied for a diploma in wine tasting and winemaking. Since then, he has visited wine regions around the world and authored several books, including his annual Descorchados, a Chilean wine guide; The Wines of Colchagua Valley; TodoVino and Wines for Great Occasions. Tapia is also the South American correspondent for The Oxford Companion to Wine, The World Atlas of Wine and Oz Clarke’s Pocket Wine Book. For the past three years, he’s been a host on the El Gourmet channel in South America. At Wine & Spirits, Tapia is the critic for the wines of Argentina, Chile and Spain, and regularly contributes articles on these regions.