Thursday, August 17th- Bush Ranger Event, Kalleske, Red Nectar

Started the day at the Nuriootpa High School for a tour and tasting. This high school was the first in Australia to start a winemaking program to compliment its large agricultural curriculum. The students participate in all aspects of grape growing and winemaking, except for the tasting part. This wines produced from the school’s program are sold commercially and have been rated in the mid 90’s by Parker. They make Shiraz and Chardonnay.

We then drove to the Bethany area of the Barossa to a public picnic spot for the 2nd annual Bush Ranger Event. This event was created by Dan Philips to honor Rhone-inspired wines made in Australia and to allow multiple producers to get together and talk about and drink each other’s wines. We started the event with a aged vertical tasting of RBJ Theologicum wines lead by Chris Ringland. We tasted 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999.
The producers started showing up after the RBJ tasting and we all dined on casoulet and many other goodies. This was followed by more drinking, hanging-out, playing cricket, kiegel, etc.
On hand with their Grenache and GSM based wines were producers and growers from…
Burge, Gibson, Glaymond, Kalleske, RBJ, Rockford, Rusden, Samuel’s Gorge, Teusner, Willows, R Winery, and more

After 6 hours of this we hopped on the bus and head to Greenock for a tour of the Kalleske vineyards. On the way we toured the vineyards of Red Nectar. These vineyards are owned by Troy Kalleke’s cousin, Tami Schutz We followed Kalleske vineyard and winery the tour with a cleansing ale and dinner at the Greenock Creek Tavern hosted by Kalleske and Red Nectar.

Tasted with dinner were…
2005 Kalleske Clarry’s White
2005 Kalleske Clarry’s Red
2004 Kalleske Greenock Shiraz
2004 Kalleske Old Vine Grenache
2004 Kalleske Shiraz Johan Gerog
2005 Kalleske Lorraine Late Harvest Semillon
2005 Kalleske Shiraz VP (vintage port- barrel sample)

2005 Red Nectar Shiraz
2005 Red Nectar Cabernet