Ochota Barrels "Green Room" Grenache Noir, McLaren Vale, Australia 2023

FROM VINE STREET

THE WINE: This is the fifth vintage of the wine being varietally labelled. The Greek Room Vineyard, a.k.a. the Grancari vineyard in the Onkaparinga Hills, has always been the source of fruit for this wine and remains one of the great sites in the Ochota Barrels’ lineup. ‘The Green Room’ was created as an incubator of sorts for a wine ready for the ‘big stage’ and this wine has certainly arrived and the name will continue moving forward. The Grenache for this wine was Amber’s earliest pick of the year for this vineyard, which is owned and operated by the Ochotas’ dear old friend, Rino. The 81-year-old certified organic vines are tucked in behind suburbia, and with an easy and lightly worked fermentation comes a youthful, fragrant, and bright wine.

The fruit was hand-harvested over two weeks in mid-February. The fruit was fermented with ambient yeasts, with about half the batch fermenting entirely whole-cluster. The fruit was all cold-soaked for five days until wild yeast fermentation kicked off. The ferments were gently foot stomped and hang plunged between one week and a month depending on the ferment. The wine was basket-pressed to old French barriques for five months of aging then blended and settled in tank. It was bottled without fining and just a small 46 ppm sulfur addition and pad filtration.

THE PRODUCER: The Ochota Barrels tale began on a surf trip, late in 2000 along the Mexican west coast in a Volkswagen campervan. A final destination after traveling some of the world’s best wine and surf regions, Taras and Amber Ochota conceived the idea to make super premium wines back home in South Australia. The concept was to concentrate on the zenith variety of McLaren Vale (Grenache) and the Barossa Valley (Shiraz), find an exceptional old vineyard site in each region and create plush, small batch, single vineyard wines. Over the years the regions and vineyards may have shifted on a few wines, but the focus has always remained the same, showing precision and compression in the wines.

As an Oenology graduate from Adelaide University, Taras developed his craft at wineries such as Two Hands and MSV in the Barossa Valley. He and Amber had worked together making wine for Oenoforos in Sweden crafting primarily Italian wines for the monopoly. California was also a regular vintage destination of Taras and Amber, where they made wines with producers such as Kunin, Bonnacorsi, Arcadian, Schrader, Outpost and the famous Hitching Post’s label, Hartley-Ostini, from the movie ‘Sideways’. The Ochotas took a less is more approach to winemaking and infused their love for music into the wines in both a literal and figurative sense. In fact, the majority of the wines are named after meaningful bands/songs (Fugazi, Slint, I am the Owl, Texture Like Sun, etc.). Figuratively Taras has said that “music and wine are so connected in so many ways, I reckon you can often see the styles of music people like in the wines they make. I like edgy music, rawer, sharper, and my wines tend to be all elbows and knees sticking out. Someone else might like folk music, and they make rustic, countryesque wines. And then you get mainstream big production wines that taste like music that’s been overdubbed and auto-tuned and had things taken out and put back in.”