Thursday, September 25, 2025

Blue Eye’d Boy with Flank Steak

Blue Eye’d Boy Shiraz with Grilled Flank Steak

Our last night hosting Linda’s sororiety sister Pat at our Destin (FL) vacation rental home, we grilled flank steak and served with baked potatoes and haricot verts. 

Pat picked up one of our shared favorite wines at Chan’s Wine World, Destin, for the occasion, for pairing with the grilled beefsteak.

Mollydooker Blue Eye’d Boy McLaren Vale Shiraz 2022 

This is one of our favorite big bold Aussie Shiraz’s and whimsically shares the Blue Eye’d Boy moniker designation between the producer and us with our son Alec, hence this being one of our family signature wines we keep and have fun commemorating our son.

This is one of several labels from this prolific producer that we collect. Producer Mollydooker offer a brand and portfolio of whimsical labels, each featuring a cartoonish character on the label. Even the brand name, Mollydooker, which is Australian lingo for a left-handed person, is a comical play on words, named for the two left handed owner/producers/founders Sarah and Sparky Marquis. I chronicled the Mollydooker brand and their portfolio of wines in this earlier blogpost

I wrote about Mollydooker and the Blue Eye’d Boy label in more detail last year in the blogpost - Blue Eye’d Boy McLaren Vale Shiraz 2020

Here’s a compendium of various posts in these pages about the fun we have with this label and the rest of the Mollydooker portfolio of wines. Here is a selection of several previous posts on the subject:

September 10, 2022 - Blue Eye'd Boy & Brunier Racines for BBQ Rib Dinner 

March 11, 2022 - Blue Eye'd Boy and CDP for Italian Beef Dinner

May 5, 2012 - Graduation celebration wine tasting flight

February 7, 2014 - Mollydooker 'Carnival of Love' Shiraz 2011


We hold more than a half dozen vintages of this label and this is the newest, latest release which we're trying here for the first time, since we customarily will open the oldest vintage in our cellar as part of cellar inventory management. 

The Blue Eyed Boy on the label is Luke, son of producer winemaker Sarah Marquis, shown stomping grapes as a kid. Today Luke heads up the Mollydooker Sales Team.

Winemaker tasting notes - “The 2022 Blue Eyed Boy is impressively deep in colour, displaying vibrant dark purple hues. Its aromatic profile is both intricate and inviting, with scents of blueberry, fresh plum, and subtle hints of mocha cream bursting from the glass. This wine is a balance of strength and finesse, delivering layers of lush, fresh berries and a touch of aniseed spice, culminating in a final note of creamy chocolate. With generous and dynamic layers, the wine allows the gentle tannins to craft a smooth and enduring finish, ensuring a truly memorable experience.’ 
The grapes for this release were sourced from the Coppermine Road, Gateway, Long Gully Road and Mollydooker Home vineyards in McLaren Vale, and Joppich vineyard in Langhorne Creek. 

This wine was barrel fermented and matured in 100% American oak, using 54% new and 46% one year old barrels. 

Mollydooker have developed a metric they call “The Marquis Fruit Weight” that they use to measure the quality of their wines. The Fruit Weight is the percentage of your palate (from the tip to the very back of your tongue) that’s covered by the velvety sensation of fruit that occurs when a wine’s tannins, alcohol, and acid are all perfectly balanced.

During the growing season through vinification, they continuously assess & record Fruit Weight throughout the entire growing & winemaking process. In the vineyard, they’re looking for the perfect intersection of the increasing flavour curve and the decreasing acidity curve.

During the growing season, as the grapes mature on the vine, acidity begins to drop and flavour and sugars dramatically increase. In a span of about 4 weeks, they reach the ‘Sweet Spot’ that they’re seeking for each target wine. When the grapes reach that level, they are harvested.

The Actual Fruit Weight for 2022 Blue Eyed Boy is 79%, within the designated target range for the required Marquis Fruit Weight™ for the Family Series which is 75% – 85%. 

This release was rated 92 points by Wine Spectator.

Dark deep inky purple colored, full bodied, almost a bit angular and obtuse, rich concentrated forward super ripe sweet blueberry black raspberry and plum fruits with notes of mocha chocolate, coffee, anise and spice with moderate tannins on the smooth lingering finish.

RM 91 points.