I grabbed this Aussie take on a Bordeaux blend when some Aussie lamb pie was destined for our dinner plates. Most of the Aussie reds in the cellar involve Shiraz. So, there was a teensy bit of wild & wacky in this choice after all. Haan is not a producer that I recognize as normally being available in the Vancouver market. If memory serves, I picked this up when the winery attended the Vancouver International Wine Festival some years back. Seeing as how it's an '04, that would have been some years ago.
I'm not sure if the winery is still around as links to the winery's website don't appear to be up and running as I write this. I found one link that, for some reason, connected Haan to the Chateau Tanunda site. So, maybe the Haan winery and/or label was purchased by the Tanunda group and their grand assortment of wines.
The wine blends in all five of the "classic quintet" of red Bordeaux grapes and the back label breaks the wine down as Cab Sauv (35%), Merlot (27%), Cab Franc (23%), Petit Verdot (9%) and Malbec 6%). I guess it won't matter much whether we loved or hated the wine though because it wouldn't appear that we'll be finding any more.
For the record though, we found it to be an interesting departure from many of the big, fruit forward Barossa Shiraz wines that would have been coming out of Australia back in '04. There was still plenty of heft to the wine but some of that weight came from the new oak as opposed to simple fruit extraction.
As such, this may be the only (or solo) Haan wine we'll ever open (pardon the pun), but we definitely wouldn't turn another bottle - whether or not there was going to be lamb on the dinner table.
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