2012 Kaesler Wines Alte Reben Shiraz Barossa Valley Australia 750 ml

97 points. Hundred-year-old vines. An unbelievable price. It’s next to impossible to figure out where to begin with the 2012 Kaesler Alte Reben Shiraz Barossa Valley. We’ve been working on securing this dark, inky, and concentrated ancient-vine Shiraz for years, but Kaesler’s popularity in their home country makes these wines notoriously hard to get in the States.

Today, our persistence and patience pay off, as we offer you our tiny allocation—just 20 cases—of this incredible 97-point wine from Down Under.

Finally opening the carefully-packed Alte Reben at our tasting panel revealed a wine well worth the wait. Pouring opaque and showing just a touch of age at the rim, one deep inhalation revealed Northern Rhône herbs and complexity, setting the stage for a full-bodied core of blackberries and black raspberries seasoned with thyme and cracked pepper. With its creamy, expressive, and expansive palate framed by silky tannins, plus the beautifully softened edges of a seven-year-aged library release, this old-vine Shiraz bottling is perfectly balanced, drinking beautifully now, and poised to cellar well for another five to seven years.  

There are very few wines in Australia that belong in the same ballpark as world-famous icons like Penfolds Grange and Henschke Hill of Grace. Kaesler’s Alte Reben is certainly one. Made from some of the oldest vines on the Kaesler property, the 97 points it earned from Australian wine authority James Halliday put the Alte Reben is in striking distance of those legends’ 99-point 2012 bottlings—both of which run north of $700—for about a tenth of the price.

The Kaesler family settled their dusty piece of land in the Barossa Valley in the 1840s. Fifty years later, they had planted their entire 96-acre estate with Rhone varieties: Shiraz, Grenache, and Mataro (Mourvèdre). In addition to the home vineyards, they acquired a vineyard in the Barossa subregion of Maranaga, which was planted with eight acres of Shiraz in 1899.  

Those gnarled vines that produce Alte Reben (which means “old vines” in German) are still poking through the sandy loam topsoil of the Bogan Block at Marananga, their roots buried deep in the deeper clay and limestone soils. These qualify as Centenarian vines as per the Barossa Old Vine Charter, and in a few short years, they’ll qualify as 125-year Ancestor vines.

The value of old vines in incalculable: As they get older, production goes down, and all the flavor that the vine can muster goes into fewer and fewer grapes. At this age, the production of Kaesler’s Bogan Block is minuscule, and all the character from the extraordinarily mineral-rich land manifests in a flagship red that presents a gorgeous picture of a historic property at an extremely rare price.