Michael Madrigale (Boulud Sud), Michelle Bisceglia (Blue Hill) and Josiah Baldivino (Bay Grape)—Team Napa Valley 2014—arrived in Adelaide, South Australia, on Friday, immediately setting out on a search for shiraz and grenache in Adelaide Hills and McLaren Vale. Bisceglia sent this post from their first day down under. —ed.
We started off the day with a benchmark tasting of Adelaide Hills shiraz—37 different shiraz, all blind. Our take home: fresh!! The wines are really fresh and it was pretty easy for us to choose a top three together. We are feeling pretty excited about the region!
Having the only day with free time (and just three hours of free time), we decided to go to a national wildlife park to see some kangaroos and koalas. It’s cold and raining, but it was so worth it.
We had lunch (washed our hands first!!) and then headed to taste wines at Murdoch Hill. We tasted shiraz, pinot meunier, chardonnay and pinot noir. The wines were killer and we are stoked. Our discussions constantly revolve around grape varietal: which should we choose? What’s Australian terroir defined by? We also got to smell crushed fresh eucalyptus leaves and realized why certain aussie shiraz have that menthol thing going on…
We finished the day with a great lamb dinner with a few winemakers. We had Australian versions of shiraz, pinot meunier, fiano (yes, fiano!) and a few others. We started to fall asleep standing up so we went home to dream about kangaroos and tasmanian devil.—Michelle Bisceglia
This story appears in the print issue of jan 2019.
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