Shaw and Smith - Balhannah Vineyard Shiraz - 2022

There’s a lot going on here, that’s for sure. It’s a mesh of ripe blue and black fruit, grilled meat, pepper and spice, dried herbs and juniper berry, seaweed, and dried flower perfume. It’s medium-bodied, meaty and spicy, sweet fruit but also strewn with aromatic spice and herb, tannin is grainy and silty, and there’s something of an olive tapenade thing, and gentle bitterness of orange peel, almost Negroni-like, and the finish is long with plenty of grip and extract. Very good. As an aside, stylistically this might be called ‘Syrah’, though I like that S+S have stuck to the knitting and kept its Australian name. 95 Points Gary Walsh, The Wine Front