Is this wine particularly ‘varietal’? Nope. Is this wine unfeasibly delicious? Hell yes. This juicy, easygoing tempranillo isn’t here to teach you about what tempranillo should taste like – but it has more than enough interest and character to keep you drinking after the first glass.
This wine is aromatically inviting from the get-go, leading with lilts of rose and subtle musk. On the palate, it sluices into a thirst-slaking riot of jubey ripe watermelon, watermelon rind, crunchy pomegranate, and pale shades of cherry. Earthy licks of nori, iodine, and dried herbs rescue this wine from pure ‘fruit bomb’ territory – aided by some crunchy green jalapeño lending perky definition, and a faint sprinkle of freshly torn dill for interest. Classic, mid-weighted tempranillo this ain’t – wonderfully and unashamedly so, with the variety’s prettier alter ego encouraged by whisking the skins off the fermenting juice part-way through fermentation. The end result is spring incarnate – and very well-made for the genre of juicy, smashable light red. Pair this one only with a sense of giddy abandon.
Tempranillo is Spain’s most celebrated red grape, accounting for the lion’s share of many of their top wines, most famously from Rioja and Ribera del Duero. It’s a grape that has a decent foothold in this country, too, with over 700 hectares planted. Although often associated with a warm climate, tempranillo favours a more moderate one, producing flavours in both a red and black fruit spectrum, with berries, plums, cherries, florals and woody herbs, with savoury notes of earth and tobacco not uncommon – cola is also a common descriptor.
In Spanish, joven simply means “young” – and that’s exactly what this style of wine is all about. A joven wine is bottled soon after fermentation, without spending time ageing in oak barrels. The focus is on bright, fresh fruit flavours, juicy texture, and easy-drinking appeal. Think of it as the “drink now” version of a wine – vibrant, approachable, and made to be enjoyed while it’s still full of youthful energy. You’ll often find joven reds in regions like Rioja or Ribera del Duero, showing off pure, lively fruit rather than the deeper, savoury notes that come from barrel ageing.
The Hunter Valley is Australia’s oldest wine region, shading Western Australia’s Swan Valley by a bit less than a decade. Those first plantings were somewhat furtive, with eight hectares in the ground by 1823 on the banks of the Hunter River in what is now the Dalwood/Gresford area, between Maitland and Singleton. Its role as the country’s first wine region means it has also been a nexus of Australian wine industry power – for both good (see Maurice O’Shea’s visionary winemaking work, which went on to define much of how we drink today) and ill (see the dilution of Hunter Valley character and quality as wine brands such as Lindeman’s, Rosemount and Wyndham Estate became monoliths untethered from their regional origins). Having been an unintentional casualty of the corporatisation and decline of Australian wine megabrands, though, the Hunter is now going through a renaissance, with a cohort of exciting young producers redefining what this region is capable of, and Australian winedrinkers rediscovering the virtues of aged Hunter semillon and mid-weight, spicy Hunter shiraz.
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