Our Top 100 Wines of Australia report is likely to cause at least a few astonished reactions, with many people asking why our Australian Wine of the Year isn’t a shiraz red. What on earth is going on?
Sure, shiraz remains the category that millions of consumers around Planet Wine associate with Australia, and not without reason. It is the most widely planted wine grape Down Under, comprising almost a third of the country’s 146,000 hectares of vineyards. However, it is by no means the whole story.
When James Suckling, the tasting team and I were in Australia in October, what impressed us most was the sheer number of wine categories in which there were stunning bottles. The spectrum of excellence is very wide indeed.
Next up is the fact that our annual Top 100 reports are not just about ratings. The second criterion for inclusion is the scale of production. Wines only produced in homeopathic quantities are always excluded from our Top 100s, and wines with rather limited quantity get pushed farther down the list.
The next important factor is one that we all look at when buying wine: the price. For example, WineSearcher.com gives the global average price for our Australian Wine of the Year, the Deep Woods Estate Chardonnay Margaret River Reserve 2021 as $38. For an almost perfect chardonnay, that’s really friendly.
The large number of chardonnays and dry rieslings in the Top 100 Wines of Australia this year has a lot to do with the way that nearly all the best Australian wines from these grapes offer excellent value for money.
Our Australian Wine of the Year combines this with quite wide international distribution, which means you have a good chance of finding it. One of the purposes for these lists is to help you make discoveries that expand your wine-drinking horizons. This list is an invitation to discover an entire continent of aroma and flavor.
That combination of factors enabled this simultaneously rich, elegant and fascinating chardonnay to trump the four stunning shiraz reds that also made our Top 10 of Australia this year.
The thing that really makes this wine unique is it comes from a maritime climate with a modest difference between daytime highs and nighttime lows. That means that the grapes in Margaret River ripen very differently, resulting in a range of aromas and flavors. This amazing wine’s flavors of seashells, gunpowder and salt are not only delightful and uplifting, they are also light years removed from the negative stereotype of Australian wine as alcoholic, jammy reds.
READ MORE: TOP 100 WINES OF AUSTRALIA 2021
RIESLING, GRENACHE AND BEYOND
We’ve been following Jeffrey Grosset, the globally acclaimed winemaker in South Australia’s Clare Valley, for almost a quarter of a century. As exciting as his wines were right from the beginning, they have only gotten better.
Just as our Australian Wine of the Year shows that Australia can play in the top global league for chardonnay, our No. 2, the Grosset Riesling Clare Valley Polish Hill 2022, proves it can do the same with dry riesling. Not only is this an exceptional example of the category from an excellent vintage with a cornucopia of citrus, stone-fruit and wildflower aromas, it also has an intense minerality. That comes from the Mintaro slate bedrock from which the soil of the high-altitude Polish Hill sub-region of the Clare Valley derives.
Which is to say that this wine proves that terroir exists in Australia every bit as much as it does in Europe. This is a great and unique wine of place and also a rare example of a biodynamically produced Australian wine. Grosset is also working to restore the native ecosystem around his vineyards.
It would be hard to imagine a wine more different to the Grosset Polish Hill 2022 than our No. 3 Australian wine, the S.C. Pannell Grenache McLaren Vale Old McDonald 2021, with its supercharged red berry and plum aromas plus layered fine tannins.
Grenache has been in Australia since at least the 1840s, and we regard the McLaren Vale of South Australia as the wine region best suited to it in the entire Southern Hemisphere. The reason for this is that, like Margaret River, the proximity of the ocean creates a special climatic niche.
I spent some time talking to Stephen Pannell, and he is a very thoughtful winemaker dedicated to creating wines with originality and finesse – qualities that the Old McDonald has in great abundance. And with its enormous vitality it’s surely just at the beginning of a long life.
And although it doesn’t say so on the label, our No. 4 Australian wine, the Torbreck Shiraz Barossa The Struie 2020, is mostly from Eden Valley, the high-altitude sub-region of Barossa where James Suckling, the team and I stayed when we were tasting in the region. It’s a ruggedly beautiful and rocky landscape and I think you can taste that in this shiraz masterpiece.
READ MORE: TOP 100 WINES OF THE WORLD 2022 AND OUR WINE OF THE YEAR
This wine has impressive richness of black fruit aromas and a considerable fleshiness, plus there’s also enormous structure and the finish is shaped by the magnificent plush tannins that give it fantastic balance. It’s an excellent answer to anyone who thinks all top Australian reds are jammy. The friendly price for a Barossa shiraz of this class is what pushed this higher than the most famous wine from the same producers, the RunRig.
All of the wines in the Top 10, along with many of those further down the list, have tremendous aromatic complexity. The Tyrrell’s Shiraz Hunter Valley Old Patch 2021, in 5th place, is one of the shining examples of this.
Bark, moss and dark mushrooms sound like the aromas you would imagine finding in a great syrah from the Rhone – the homeland of the grape called shiraz in Australia for reasons no wine historian can adequately explain.
I mention history, because this wine comes from vines planted back in 1867. It is a little-known fact that Australia has a remarkable number of such heirloom plantings. Of course, the creaminess of the tannins in this wine is very un-Rhone-like, but that’s what makes this perfumed masterpiece so special.
PUTTING PEWSEY VALE BACK ON TOP
In most places, the 6th-placed Pewsey Vale Riesling Eden Valley The Contours Museum Reserve 2016 is going to cost you less than $30, which is a steal for a wine of this level of sophistication that’s close to seven years of age!
Time has smoothed the acidity and enabled the lime and grapefruit aromas to move in a marmalade direction, which is the classic maturation curve for Australian dry riesling. And yet there’s still so much life in here.
The Contours block was planted in 1965, but the history of Pewsey Vale Vineyard goes back to 1847. A riesling from here was one of the first Australian wines to be internationally acclaimed at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867. Putting Pewsey Vale back on top is a remarkable achievement for winemaker Louisa Rose.
Following No. 6 with another dry riesling might seem like risking repetition, but nobody has done more to build aromatic and textural complexity into the wines of this category than the Mitchell family in the Clare Valley.
Their Mitchell Riesling Clare Valley Watervale 2022, at No. 7, is a magnificent example of this work. The delicacy of the floral aromas shows that power is not necessarily an enemy of subtlety. This wine shows what working with fully ripe fruit and wild fermentation can do for Australian dry riesling.
And the totally breathtaking 2002 vintage of this wine that (the first great vintage under screw caps!) I blind tasted while in the Clare Valley judging the regional wine show proved how magnificently these wines age.
At No. 8, at once perfumed, powerful and energetic, the Vasse Felix Chardonnay Margaret River Heytesbury 2021 is an extroverted and energetic wine that is unashamedly New World but also beautifully balanced and ageworthy.
This fits the Vasse Felix story in an ideal way, this having been the first winery founded in the Margaret River region in 1967 by Dr. Tom Cullity, a cardiologist. It was a daring and risky move planting vineyards just four kilometers from the chilly waters of the Indian Ocean. Back then it was by no means obvious that this was an ideal location for making great wine. This magnificent chardonnay fully vindicates his quintessentially Australian daring and determination.
READ MORE: TOP 100 WINES OF NEW ZEALAND 2022
Penfolds Grange is unquestionably the most famous high-end Australian wine, and the excellent 2018 vintage enabled the Penfolds winemaking team to craft a great Grange.
The first impression of the 9th-place Penfolds Shiraz South Australia Bin 95 Grange 2018 is that it’s impressive and brazen, with abundant blackcurrant and black cherry fruit plus notes of charcoal, chocolate, spices and much else. And we find the combination of enormous concentration and plushness on the palate sensational. The only reason this is placed so far down the Top 10 is the high price – almost 15 times higher than our Australian Wine of the Year!
Our No. 10 wine is also a South Australian shiraz and also expensive, but the contrast between the two says everything about the cultural richness and diversity of Australian wine. Whereas Penfolds Grange is a blend of wines from vineyards scattered across South Australia, the Henschke Shiraz Eden Valley Hill of Grace 2017 is from a single vineyard just four hectares in size.
Although the history of this wine “only” goes back to the 1958 vintage, when winemaker Stephen Henschke’s father, Cyril, created the first Hill of Grace, the oldest vines there date back to 1860. The combination of this, the high-altitude location in the Eden Valley and the relatively cool 2017 has resulted in a refined Hill of Grace with great elegance.
– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor
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