Plainly put, Callum Powell knows shiraz inside and out. His dad, Dave Powell, is something of a living legend in the Australian wine world, the founder of the fêted Torbreck Vintners. Callum grew up in and around the winery, working a handful of vintages before jetting off to spend time with titans of the northern Rhône and honing his craft back home at the likes of Tyrrell’s and Jasper Hill.
Agricola Vintners, Callum’s first solo outing, began as three barrels of shiraz only four vintages ago, but it has rapidly become one of the Barossa’s most talked-about emerging labels. There’s a clear vision at work here: to extract the very best expressions from holy-grail vineyard sites, and to present a picture of today’s Barossa informed as much by heritage as evolution. And golly does it succeed.
Four wines now make up the stable, and this year’s line-up is simply outstanding. The 2023 Ebenezer Shiraz, from a vineyard with plantings that stretch back to 1888(!), rocks a tight core of spice with layers of chewy dark plum, smudged raspberry and Black Forest cake wrapped around. It’s dense and thick but there’s remarkable levity and plushness at work, too. Dynamite. Century-plus year-old vines also form the basis for the 2023 Flaxman Valley Shiraz, which shows remarkable purity. It opens with a starburst of red fruit, but the layers reveal themselves and just keep on going: potpourri, rosewater, game meats, amaro. One to sit on, for sure.
There’s even more spice in the 2023 K’Sands Shiraz, a notch higher in alcohol but decidedly medium-bodied. Some of these vines were planted in 1864(!!), so there’s a definitively hearty and savoury depth to it, even with all the exotic perfume of cloves, rose petals, cardamom, bell pepper, crushed rocks. Holy heck, just so distinctive and captivating. That tension between power and prettiness is very much alive in the 2023 DWxHV Shiraz as well, a blend of two heavyweight Barossa vineyard plots. It’s robust, firmly tannic, the palate flush with chewy purple and black fruits, cola, Darjeeling tea and, yes, that kaleidoscope of spice yet again.
These really are wines you want to settle down with, whether that means stowing them away for a few years or simply opening them in the morning, before pouring them at night and letting them unfurl over the next day or two. Patience is prudence.