WINEMAKER NOTES: Chester's Tasting Note:
Upon release d’Arenberg’s The Dead Arm Shiraz has a vivid young deep purple colour.
The nose shows intense and complex cedary, fig, blackberry and blueberry like smells occasionally pepper/spice smells too.
Vanilla mocha oak smells and attacking blackberry, cassis characters are also evident on the palate.
Full, intense sweet, cedary middle palate flavours have a distinctly silky, svelte texture deceptively disguises the rich powerful cassis and toffee-mocha flavours.
The accent is on powerful full-bodied berry fruit flavour, with a little sweet English toffee- like oak evident on the juicy, rolling finish.
After time in bottle the d’Arenberg’s Dead Arm gains a biscuity, cinnamon, caramel and eucalyptus based bouquet on top of rich blackberry pie smells.
Tobacco, mushrooms, malt, and earth aromas play a part on the long, elegant fleshy, chocolate mint flavours.
Restrained tannin and acidity coupled with rich alcohol, produce a seamless, peppery, velvety rolling length.
Serving and Cellaring Suggestions:
Serve at room temperature 16 – 24 �C. now or cellar for the next 3- 25 years with bold, rich, robust meals, especially roasted meats and vegetables, stews and casseroles, offal, sweet potato, salt bush lamb, oxtail, mushrooms or truffles. Also, sausages and gravy and haricot beans on rare prime steak. Serve after decanting as an older wine.
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The Dead Arm Shiraz is one of our ‘flagship’ wines at d’Arenberg – the very best Shiraz from one of the oldest producers in arguably the best Shiraz producing region in Australia, McLaren Vale. The Dead Arm gets its name in a fairly inauspicious way – it is named after the disease (Eutypa Lata) which afflicts some of the oldest vines at d’Arenberg from which we get the majority of fruit destined for The Dead Arm. The disease, Eutypa Lata, or ‘Dead Arm’ is common all around the world in old vineyard sites. The disease in effect slowly reduces one of the ‘arms’ of the vines to dead wood, which then means the other arm of the vine produces small volumes of the most incredibly concentrated and highly flavoured grapes. This makes ideal material to go into this, our top Shiraz. The grapes are processed as are all of d’Arenberg reds, using the gentle Demoisy rubber toothed, open-mouthed crusher, and fermented in wax-lined, headed down open fermenters which are foot trod (and being ever hygiene-conscious here at d’Arenberg, the feet are clad in waders!) and temperature controlled. The still fermenting grapes are pressed off in baskets through the old ‘Coq’ and ‘Bromley & Tregoning’ presses into mainly new American and French oak barriques for 22 months or thereabouts, before blending and bottling at d’Arenberg. The Dead Arm is a spectacular example of McLaren Vale Shiraz – concentrated, multi-dimensional with huge fruit, length and texture, immense balance and ageing potential.
And the comment from Robert M. Parker who writes for the American publication The Wine Advocate is worth mentioning. Writing of d'Arenberg's Dead Arm he described it as; “…outrageously rich, spectacular stuff, the likes of which only Aussies seem capable of making.”
Source:http://www.darenberg.com.au/C_05-02c.php?id=113

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