Deen de Bortoli Vat 8 Shiraz 2006
Tonight I'm going to try a wine given as a corporate gift this christmas season! Its an Australian wine, very highly rated by many wine critics and magazines as a value for money wine. Its labeled as a Southeastern Aussie wine as it's grapes hail from the Riverina, New South Wales and Victoria regions. This usually means a varied fruit and terroir flavors(Hopefully!) from 3 regions and usually a more balanced wine. I think this is a good time to explain what is a WINE VAT and why do some wines have them on their label such as this one.

In its simplest form, a vat is a traditional term for a large wooden cask used to age the wines after they've finished with their fermentation process, so different vats usually have some signature characters and so were labelled to diferentiate its quality.

Ok, so lets go with the tasting notes before I finish up the whole bottle!

APPEARANCE
A very deep & lively purple hue showing its youthful vibrance with bold tears, but with surprisingly poor clarity, you can barely see through its core. I would usually guess that it went through minimal fining with the purpose of giving it more natural fruit characters, but for a winery like de Bortoli, I do believe that the fining was done, so i'll still be guessing the reason for its clarity after this.

NOSE
Bold vanilla flavors with old liquorice fill the nose with fresh plums domainating. There're hints of smoky bacon and spicy tones, but I think that it's still a tad under-develop and will definitely be better after a few years.

PALATE
Lively tannins with fresh blackberry flavors fill the mouth, A good weight on the tongue and a decent smooth texture from the oak. Rather short finish though.

CONCLUSION
A nice wine to drink with food, definitely too young and has maybe 1-2 years of growing up to do. Currently, I find it rather unbalanced between the fruit tannins and oak, but has decent fruit characters to continue drink.