2023 was quite a year for Oliver’s Taranga. You can’t say the Oliver’s team do things by halves, we’ve squeezed a lot into 2023!
And where did it all start?
VINTAGE 2023
2023 was the third year in a row impacted by La Nina, which meant a long cool ripening period and solid rains leading up to harvest for McLaren Vale wineries. This made for some perfect flavour and tannin development, but a later than usual vintage, and we all had to hold our nerve to wait for the exact picking window for each variety.
Corrina is thrilled at the quality of the 2023 vintage, though she could have done with some more Fiano which suffered a hail event early in the season that reduced the crops significantly.
We have also been busy in the vineyard planting some new blocks over the past year- so expect to see some interesting new varieties (…falanghina anyone!?!?) coming out in the next couple of years.
MEMBER WEEKEND
We were thrilled to be able to host our member weekends again in August this year. Across two weekends we closed the McLaren Vale Cellar Door for a series of exclusive, and complimentary, events for our OTT members.
The perfect way to say thank you to all our loyal OTT members, these events showcased new vintages, included lots of exclusive offers, and most importantly involved a lot of laughs and fun by all!
We’ll definitely be hosting these again in 2024, so mark your calendars for August next year to join us for these unmissable events.
OLIVER & PRESS
Oliver’s Taranga decided to go big in 2023 and buy a winery! Together with wine veteran Mike Press, Oliver & Press Winemakers is the perfect McLaren Vale winery to make small batch wines, so Corrina is thrilled!
There’s also some extra room for other local, small wineries to make wine too, so our new colleagues at Oliver & Press will be kept busy this coming 2024 vintage, supporting plenty of McLaren Vale wineries.
VALTTERI & IHANA
One of the standout projects for 2023 began with a VIP visit to Taranga by F1 driver Valtteri Bottas and partner, professional cyclist and local, Tiffany Cromwell in December 2022.
Following that initial visit, Valtteri’s dream of making his own wine was one step closer. So when he was back in Australia for the Melbourne GP in March, he squeezed in a side trip to McLaren Vale to get his hands dirty during vintage with Corrina.
The result is IHANA, the Finnish word for wonderful, a premium, McLaren Vale Shiraz, blended by Valtteri & Corrina – a celebration of competitive craftsmanship.
IHANA has taken us plenty of new places this year, and it has been quite the adventure. First, it was the USA release of IHANA at the Austin GP in October, where Valtteri introduced us to a whole new crowd of wine and F1 lovers. And just last week, Sam & Corrina travelled all the way to Finland to join Valtteri in his homeland for a series of launch events. Before the events they snuck in a visit to Lapland and visited the REAL Santa!
PARTIES
We hope you were able to join us this year for one of last Sunday of the month lunches, whether it was our signature Porchetta Party, or maybe our Italian or Spanish party.
The one we got very excited by was our collaboration with local legends The Little Rickshaw. Trinh and Mike treated us to an exceptional menu of modern South-East Asian cuisine that made the Oliver’s Taranga wines sing!
We are already planning our parties for next year, starting with the Porchetta Party on February 25th, with more parties announced at the start of next year, including a Tasting Australia event in May.
We hope 2023 included plenty of your own amazing highlights, hopefully accompanied by a glass of Oliver’s Taranga.
From all of us here, we would like to say thank you for choosing our wines this year, and we look forward to plenty more things to celebrate in 2024.
In the meantime, enjoy a wonderful break with friends and family!
Corrina, Brioni, Sam and the OT team