Region: Barossa Valley
Sub Region: Barossa – Multi-site
Variety: Shiraz
Country: Australia
Vintage: 2017
The Wine
Basket Press is one of the wines that preserved the traditional Barossa style through an era of increasingly polished Australian Shiraz. Rockford sources small parcels of established Shiraz from long-standing Barossa growers across several sub-regions, giving the wine complexity that comes from blending sites rather than attempting to express a single vineyard.
Winemaking is deliberately old-fashioned: hand-picked fruit, open fermentation, traditional basket pressing and approximately two years maturation in seasoned American and French oak. The objective has remained essentially unchanged—to produce a deeply coloured, earthy, age-worthy Australian red where fruit and vineyard sit ahead of new oak and cellar technique.
The 2017 is now entering a particularly interesting stage. Initially generous and open-knit, bottle age has brought greater savoury complexity: blackberry, black olive, liquorice, tar, forest floor and roasting meat, with the once-firm tannin becoming increasingly supple.
It is less polished than many contemporary Barossa icons, but that is precisely its appeal. Basket Press tastes unmistakably of an older Australian wine tradition.
Cellared Says
2017 has come into its own with some bottle age. It was always a generous Basket Press, but it now has much more savoury complexity around the fruit and the tannins have softened beautifully. This is exactly why I like buying mature Rockford rather than only current releases—you get to see the wine becoming what it was built to be.
Reviews
“Ripe yet delicate red fruit aromas and layered fine tannins that give this enormous textural complexity.”
97 Points – James Suckling
Top 100 Wines of Australia 2022
“Blackberry, black olive, tar, forest-floor and licorice… deep and long with masses of supple, velvety tannins.”
97 Points – Huon Hooke, The Real Review
Region: Barossa Valley
Sub Region: Barossa – Multi-site
Variety: Shiraz
Country: Australia
Vintage: 2017
The Wine
Basket Press is one of the wines that preserved the traditional Barossa style through an era of increasingly polished Australian Shiraz. Rockford sources small parcels of established Shiraz from long-standing Barossa growers across several sub-regions, giving the wine complexity that comes from blending sites rather than attempting to express a single vineyard.
Winemaking is deliberately old-fashioned: hand-picked fruit, open fermentation, traditional basket pressing and approximately two years maturation in seasoned American and French oak. The objective has remained essentially unchanged—to produce a deeply coloured, earthy, age-worthy Australian red where fruit and vineyard sit ahead of new oak and cellar technique.
The 2017 is now entering a particularly interesting stage. Initially generous and open-knit, bottle age has brought greater savoury complexity: blackberry, black olive, liquorice, tar, forest floor and roasting meat, with the once-firm tannin becoming increasingly supple.
It is less polished than many contemporary Barossa icons, but that is precisely its appeal. Basket Press tastes unmistakably of an older Australian wine tradition.
Cellared Says
2017 has come into its own with some bottle age. It was always a generous Basket Press, but it now has much more savoury complexity around the fruit and the tannins have softened beautifully. This is exactly why I like buying mature Rockford rather than only current releases—you get to see the wine becoming what it was built to be.
Reviews
“Ripe yet delicate red fruit aromas and layered fine tannins that give this enormous textural complexity.”
97 Points – James Suckling
Top 100 Wines of Australia 2022
“Blackberry, black olive, tar, forest-floor and licorice… deep and long with masses of supple, velvety tannins.”
97 Points – Huon Hooke, The Real Review
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