DC Shaw is a boutique producer from the Adelaide Hills creating fine wines with cool-climate varieties. Created in the vision of winemaker Charlie Shaw, the wines reference time spent in both Old and New World. Vintages for the Pillot's in Burgundy's Chassagne-Montrachet have been most significant in sculpting the approach to viticulture and winemaking.
The prioritisation of the vineyard from the Old-World along with advances in technology from the New is evident in our view of the selection of and choices in our vineyards.
Their approach to multiple cuvée's has been carried over to our Single Vineyard collection to best showcase the varied climats and unique characteristics in the Adelaide Hills.
Vineyards
Fruit is handpicked across nine vineyards from a mixture of negociant and estate sites. All are managed with long-term sustainability in mind, practicing either certified organic or organic practices to grow the best possible grapes.
With upward of 16 handpicks annually, the focus is on selecting and ensuring the fruit is picked when there is unison between sugar, phenolic, and acid ripeness. When a vineyard is managed with long-term sustainability in mind these three factors consistently come together with the only difference in flavour year to year that of a reflection of the season.
Winemaking
Our approach to winemaking is deliberate yet simple. We take action only when required, those actions are only made to better express the vineyard or region. We are precise with our picking days, astute in encapsulating the season when it comes to whole-bunch, use of lees in white wine, and balance of new French oak for elevage.
Whites are fermented in either amphora or French oak, we vary the levels of new oak depending on cuvée and its relationship to the fruit. Our reds are all fermented in small-volume open-top fermentors allowing for the development of complexity, and aged for a minimum of 12 months in both new and old French oak.
Using time as opposed to action when finishing and bottling our wines, extended tank elevage is used to settle both our whites and red as opposed to fining and filtration, except our special release RS rieslings, they’re filtered to prevent them from re-fermentation in the bottle.
From the 2023 vintage, we have returned to using natural cork, believing the advances in testing enable this choice. The wine evolves better with time and showcases the characteristics of the vintage more truly.
We make no additions except for S02 on all our whites and reds except for Shiraz. To be technical we bottle our wines with approximately 35 PPM Free S02. When it comes to shiraz we average .75 grams of tartaric acid per liter of wine, added during fermention as we believe it allows for greater phenolic ripeness and better encapsulation of the vineyards.