Hold — Although all of our wines can be enjoyed in the first year or two, cellaring in stable storage conditions will allow a wine to develop more complex and interesting characters rather than just youthfulness and adolescent freshness. Cellaring will often bring great rewards and screw caps allow faith in the result. If drinking reds young, we recommend you decant them and allow a few hours to breathe. This will bring out the best in the wines.
	Hold and Drink — This indicates that the wine can be enjoyed now or can be stored for future occasions. Generally, younger wines are tighter and more vibrant in their structure and some people prefer them this way. However, if cellaring, a wine will attain softer tannins and acidity and will mellow with age.
	Drink — This indicates the wine is at its peak maturity and has developed to its prime. In general, the wine will have optimal complexity and will have reached its highest point of drink-ability. At this stage, its time to consume as, too many wines are left in the cupboard and miss their 15 minutes of fame.
	Peaked — Alas, the time has passed when the wine looks its best. This will ultimately come to all wines, however, there are many views on what a fully mature wine has to offer and considerable drinking pleasure is still available to wines in this state. We recommend you enjoyed a wine before they dry out and head south, but keep a bottle or two for interest if that’s a style you like.

Your best cellaring guide for past vintages of DogRock wines:

Tasting notes on vintage 2009 wines

Tasting notes on vintage 2008 wines

Tasting notes on vintage 2007 wines

Tasting notes on vintage 2006 wines

Tasting notes on vintage 2005 wines

Our first ever release wines are special to us so are shown below in full view:

	2003 DogRock Shiraz — the 2003 is drinking near perfect at present. The aromas of dark fruits compliment a soft berry and dark chocolate palate. Will cellar for many years still but why wait?
	2004 DogRock Shiraz / Tempranillo – the palate has many layers of soft savoury tannins with a rounded finish making it a pleasure to drink at present. Is close to its peak but will continue to cellar for many years.

The guide to cellaring our wines offers recommendations made by Allen and Andrea. We aim to provide cellaring notes which will be updated each year upon release of our new products. As a wine age’s, it will change in complexity and maturity and our notes will provide general thoughts on the condition of each wine.

It should also be remembered that our first batch of wines have all been carefully cellared at a relative constant temperatures around 10-20°C in our wine library. This is optimum storage and wines stored at excessive temperatures (> 25°C) will have suffered a quality and longevity loss. All wines have been sealed with a screw cap or crown seal instead of cork and although the heavier wines such as Shiraz will appear tight early in their life, by the second or third year they will be similar to cork wines in maturity.

Our wine styles are not dissimilar to old style winemaking. There was modest alcohol, natural acid and minimal intervention in the vineyard and winery and you had to cellar the wines for several years to see them blossom. New crowd pleasing wines are generally higher in alcohol, have more oak and are easier to drink when young, but will fall apart just as our wines start to get going. Put simply, we aim to make great wine that becomes a greater wine.