Drinking wines made by Sierra Reed is a uniquely emotional experience, amplified if Sierra is in the room with you, discoursing on the contents of your glass. Scribbling furiously when I taste and discuss wines with their maker is an old fashioned method, but with Sierra, I feel like a committed disciple. I just listen.
You will never meet a winemaker speak with such alacrity, tension, opinion and passion, weaving the personal with the scientific, the whimsical with deeply-thought analysis. An instinctive winemaker who embodies, more than anyone I know, the total vinous experience.
Not only does she draw on the experience of life and the wines she has fallen in love with, she uses her mood and her entire sensory apparatus to help guide her decision making and the style of wine she hopes to capture. Sierra is a reminder that the most important aspect of place isn’t soil, climate or a series of numbers, but of people and their personal relationship with a place, unique to themselves.
Reed Amplitude Riesling 2024
If I was rich man I would buy every single bottle. Only 600 litres produced off what Sierra Reed emphatically stated is the best Riesling vineyard outside Germany and to emphasis the point, the Riesling is no longer, grafted over to Chardonnay for commercial reasons. If you have taken my advice, you too will feel the loss with every beautiful, tragic sip. This is the best off- dry Riesling I have tasted outside of Germany, utterly superior to anything from Australia at this point in time. Full bodied, yes indeed, there is a sense of amplitude, a sort of chiselled stature of fleshy voluminousness. Blackcurrant, clotted cream, grapefruit, blood orange, spring jasmine, white and red cherry and nectarine. Profoundly tense, every facet offset by an opposite, just begging for harmonising time.
Reed Frequency Riesling 2024
There is a sort of pulsating urgency to this wine, a frequency if you will, the feel totally different from the Baroque grandeur of the Amplitude. Lithe and sinewy, the fruit is nonetheless lavishly complex. Yellow peach, red cherry, mint, cranberry, lime and gardenia flower. Some extract here and real tannic grip, firmly holding the palate, whilst your tongue salivates with electric tension and super charged minerals. A total Riesling experience.
