Rockford Rifle Range Cabernet Sauvignon

Product Description

My grandparents on both sides and also my parents were grape growers, so my childhood was spent in their vineyards. My parents moved to North Eastern Victoria where my Father managed a vineyard for Australia’s then largest family winemakers, Seppelts. In 1965 I followed a natural path and started as a trainee winemaker at Seppelt’s Rutherglen winery. It was a wonderful apprenticeship in the old, ordered, slow and gentle Australian wine trade. The wines I drank, the winemakers from previous generations with whom I associated and everything I absorbed in that period had a major influence on the way Rockford is today. Although I’ve spent all my life in vineyards and wineries, the pleasure I derive from walking through rows of vines or casks filled with wine has not diminished. Wine is crafted, not created. The skill is to capture and enhance the fleeting flavours that grapes give from their variety and extract from the earth, then bottle these as a living record of the vintage they represent. Rockford wines are made from established Barossa varieties which form an important part of our winemaking heritage, in a style that best reflects the vineyards, the winemaker’s attitude and the climate in which we live. I have always lived in and feel most comfortable with the warm Mediterranean climate of the Barossa where grapes ripen easily. My preference is to make the wine by hand with traditional methods, attitudes and equipment to produce elegant but rich, earthy, soft, generous wines that will age.

Very rustic, old-fashioned and farmyard-like, with an ageing appearance and meaty, earthy and leathery development. Beneath its bouquet of cigar boxes and chocolates lies a hint of moccha. Smooth and polished, its palate of soft mulberry and red berry fruit and earthy complexity overlies restrained cedary oak and greenish undertones. Its finish shows distinction and definition.