Ochota Barrels The Green Room Grenache

Winemaker: Taras Ochota

Appellation: McLaren Vale, South Australia, Australia

Grape Varieties: Grenache

This is the fourth vintage of the wine being varietally labelled. The Greek Room Vineyard, a.k.a. the Grancari vineyard in the Onkaparinga Hills, has always been the source of fruit for this wine and remains one of the great sites in the Ochota Barrels’ lineup.  ‘The Green Room’ was created as an incubator of sorts for a wine ready for the ‘big stage’ and this wine has certainly arrived and the name will continue moving forward. Not a single spray was done this vintage and the certified organic, gnarly bushvines really sung the most beautiful notes.

The fruit was hand-harvested over two weeks in mid-February. The fruit was fermented with ambient yeasts, with half of the batch fermenting entirely whole-cluster.  The fruit was all cold-soaked for five days until wild yeast fermentation kicked off. The ferments were gently foot stomped and hang plunged between one week and a month depending on the ferment. The wine was basket-pressed to old French barriques for five months of aging then blended and settled in tank. It was bottled without fining and just a small 62ppm sulfur addition and pad filtration.

The ochota barrels tale began on a surf trip, late 2000 along the Mexican west coast in a Volkswagen campervan. A final destination after traveling some of the world’s most amazing wine and surf regions, Taras and Amber Ochota conceived the idea to make beautiful holistic wines back home in South Australia.

After a mis-spent youth playing a rickenbakker bass in various punk bands (listen to Kranktus’ Heckler album), Taras became an Oenology graduate from Adelaide University, developing his craft in numerous vineyards and cellars around the world to then settle with Amber on 9.6 steep gorgeous acres tucked away, deep in the Basket Range of the beautiful Adelaide Hills.

Before this Taras worked as the European Flying Winemaker Consultant, concentrating on the Italian regions, Puglia, Abruzzo Sicily and further,  for the Swedish wine importing company Oenoforos.

California was also a regular vintage destination, making wines with producers such as Kunin, Bonnacorsi, Arcadian, Schrader, Outpost and the famous Hitching Post’s label, Hartley-Ostini, from the movie ‘Sideways’.

Amber’s wine experience ranges from vintages in Italy, vineyard development and cellar door sales in the Adelaide Hills and coordinating production and wine analysis for Nordic Sea Winery in southern Sweden.

-Vine Street Imports