The Daddy Long Legs Extremely Rare - 375ml

© Stephen Case

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Alcohol by Vol:
20.7%
Residual Sugar:
226.4 g/L
Titratable Acid:
9.0 g/L
pH:
3.22
Oak Maturation:
Plenty, in old wooden Milne whisky casks- carefully guarded by our eight-legged friends
Bottling Date:
17 February 2005
Chief Winemaker:
Francis (d’Arry) Osborn
Assistant Winemaker:
Chester d’Arenberg Osborn

"This is an explosively rich, aromatic, spectacular fortified wine that is impossible to resist."

Fourth generation family winemaker Chester Osborn took over the reins as chief winemaker from his father, d’Arry in 1984. Once the keys to the winery and cellars were in his hands, Chester decided to hold back 15 barrels of the current blend of “Selected Tawny Port” a very old and exceptionally high quality fortified wine. These barrels were left to slowly mature and were only ‘topped up’ when necessary using only the same, carefully aged wine.

The barrel shed that houses these old casks is also inhabited by hundreds of Daddy Long Leg spiders, who have kept a watchful eye over these precious gems for decades. The wine was in superb condition and the spiders were doing such a great job protecting the barrels that Chester left them alone until just recently when he decided to bottle a small quantity for our pleasure. This coupled with the wines extremely ‘long legs’ due to its high alcohol and hence serious viscosity was the reason behind the naming of this very limited release.

The wine is extremely old and exemplifies a classic Australian style. The colour is of an aged wine with a soft tan appearance and tinges of green towards the edge. There is a huge array of characters in this fortified ranging from walnuts, dried raisins, caramels, toffee, molasses, caramelised cumquats and lime, melted butter and after a moment aromas of beef stock, dusty hessian, and dried herbs appear. Overall the aroma has amazing concentration. The palate has superb intensity and is fresh with flavours of baked figs, butterscotch, toffee and dried fruits such as pear and nectarine. As it opens more and more characters appear balanced with great rolling rancio length from the time spent in barrel.

The solera of old wines from the 1950’s was commenced in 1966 and each year parcels of new wines were added until sometime in the 1970’s. d’Arry Osborn always made these tawny style wines from ultra ripe bush vine Grenache in a very traditional way by fermenting the fruit in open fermenters with the cap submerged and arresting the fermentation when there is still plenty of unfermented sugars present by adding grape spirit. Once pressed off, the wine is placed in old wooden casks and forgotten about except for the odd topping up of the barrels due to the rate of evaporation.

In 2005 only 5 barrels remained as the angels had taken their share from these old barrels (evaporation) The remaining wine is hugely concentrated. During aging it is largely water, alcohol and unwanted volatile acidities and aldehydes that evaporate; therefore leaving behind a wonderfully rich, concentrated wine.

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