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 the old world, multiple vintages for the Pillot's in Burgundy's Chassagne-Montrachet have sculpted the approach to viticulture and winemaking. Their prioritisation of the vineyard within the process is evident in our view of a selection of vineyards and choices in our vineyards.
Their approach to multiple cuvée's within their AOC regulations 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, a mixture of negociant and estate, all managed with their long-term sustainability in mind, utilising either certified organic or organic practices to grow the best possible grapes.
With upward of 16 different 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 year to year that of a reflection of the season.
Winemaking
Our approach to winemaking is deliberate yet simple, we only take actions when they are required and those actions are only made to better encapsulate the expression of vineyard or region. We are precise with our picking decisions, astute with encapsulating the season when it comes to whole bunch ferments, use of lees in white wine, and balance of new French oak for elevage.
Our whites are fermented in either amphora or French oak with varying 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 then aged for a minimum of 12 months in varying levels of new French oak.
We use time as opposed to action when finishing our wines, we do extended tank elevate to settle both our whites and red rather than fining and filtration prior to bottling, well except our special release RS rieslings, they’re filtered to prevent them from re-fermenting in the bottle.
From the 2023 vintage we have returned to using natural cork, we believe the advances in testing enable this choice. The wine evolves better with time and showcases the characteristics of the vintage in a truer fashion.
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, weadd this during ferment as we believe it allows for greater phenolic ripeness and better encapsulation of the vineyards.