LAWSON’S DRY HILLS THE PIONEER GEWÜRZTRAMINER 2023

From 40+ year old vines with trunks as thick as thighs, this unique wine embraces everything that is so good about Gewürztraminer. Hugely aromatic with a pronounced and pungent perfume, the ensuring palate is rich, weighty and oily with intense, lingering flavours of exotic fruits and spices. Haunting, unwavering and high desirable.

Winery notes (2023 Vintage)
"Lemon, lychee and mango along with lovely floral aromatics combine to produce a delightful nose. The palate is rich and rounded with great fruit concentration and intensity. The 2023 vintage provided a little more acidity which gives a nice balance to this is medium style wine.

The grapes for this wine come from the company’s original vineyard, planted in 1982, that surrounds the winery. These unirrigated vines are deeply rooted in clay soils which help to give the wine great intensity, weight and body, resulting in a rich, mouth-coating texture. Harvested at a ripe 24.8 brix, the grapes were gently pressed into French oak barriques where it was left to undergo spontaneous fermentation. After several months on lees the barrels were blended and the wine bottled here at the winery."

Rated Excellent & 93/100 Cameron Douglas MS, March 2025 (2023 Vintage)
"A bouquet with elegance and intensity, fragrances of fresh and bakes apples, ginger and honeysuckle, quince and clove, a stone-like mineral quality and a white pepper herbal quality. In other words a wine with complexity and intrigue. On the palate a full-bodied expression with acidity and spice rushing the flavours of tree and stone fruits throughout, there’s a mix of elegance and raw power as well as a familiar floral and exotic fruits profile. Balanced, well made and ready to drink from day of purchase through 2028."

Reviews for previous vintages below…

5 Stars & 95/100 Bob Campbell MW, The Real Review, November 2021 (2020 Vintage)
"Absolutely delicious gewürztraminer with classic lychee, Turkish Delight, potpourri and anise spice favours. Made in an off-dry style, showing wonderful purity and intensity. A bargain at this price."

5 Stars Michael Cooper (2020 Vintage)
"Well worth cellaring, the 2020 vintage is an Alsace-style wine, estate-grown in the Home Block and fermented with indigenous yeasts in seasoned French oak barriques. From vines nearly 40 years old, ‘with trunks as thick as thighs’, it is a pale lemon/green, powerful young wine, fleshy and soft, with ripe, peachy, citrusy, spicy flavours, showing notable delicacy, complexity and depth, gentle sweetness (21 grams/litre of residual sugar), and a slightly oily richness. Still youthful, but already delicious, it should break into full stride 2023+."