Thistledown Gorgeous Grenache White 2022

White Grenache is a delicious grape variety! This is a wine that continues the search for excellent vineyard quality in differing regions of Australia: this time, it's a beautifully textured white with citrus fruits, honeysuckle and yellow apple flavours that ends with a long, gorgeous and lemon-balm finish.

This is seductive and smooth, bright and tangy, with tension and complexity.

And, like the label says, it's Gorgeous.

If you like fine white wine, you have to try this.

If you like fun white wine, you have to try this!

This is at once a gorgeous, refreshing and engaging wine, while being fascinating, curious and rare. Grenache Blanc is not a common variety outside France and Spain (it's not common there either), so finding a pioneer of this variety in Australia's Riverland presented an irresistible opportunity to the Thistledown team. They add a dollop of Chardonnay from their Adelaide Hills estates to give extra charm and the wine is set.

It's made in concrete eggs and used French barrels with no Malo-lactic fermentation to preserve its freshness, while lees ageing provides a grapey structured mouthfeel.

Mould-breaking doesn't quite do justice to our friends in Thistledown; they have done so much more than that as they set about to find old vineyard sites and create outstanding wines from them. That's not (unsurprisingly) unusual. No, it's the attention to detail and potential for extreme loss that really separates them from their peers - they genuinely take dozens of plots of gnarly old vines in different locations across Australia and vinify them into a staggeringly vast array of different cuvées. Each with its own personality and each with the potential to lose money, sales, reputation... but it seems that their skill is in finding the sites that will work and in finding the way to express the potential of each site and variety into the best version of itself. Alchemy, sort of. They own very little and lease a very large amount of vineyard area; this has allowed them to continue to shop around, so to speak, and identify the best areas available to them. They then work closely with vineyard owners and workers to ensure that the fruit apportioned to them is nurtured and then harvested to their wishes. After that, it's up to the winemaking teams to follow instructions and the rest is really magic.

The attitude, or winemaking philosophy, is to get the vineyard to speak through the grapes and into the bottle. Sounds easy? Perhaps it is, if you have located the right grapes and have a team you can trust to carry-out your orders... And that's just it - their orders have been formed from serious research and experience and, we think, have led to the creation of a simply wonderful exposé of some of Australia's greatest plots of vines.

We aren't alone - these wines are cleaning-up at awards ceremonies, which are a very big deal in Australia - and have taken home almost all of the most important awards in the last decade or so, since the wines began production. Yes, they are carving-out a niche for Grenache-based wines, but they are also skilled at some of the most elegant, complex and refined Shirazes that you'll ever be likely to taste. And the production levels are minuscule, which not only makes them very rare, but also exceptional value-for-money.

If you have ever been interested in high-quality Australian wines, please look at this winery: this is what you're looking for!

If you have only thought that Australia produces over-the-top heavy reds, then please look at this winery: it'll change your mind!

If you just want really lovely reds with loads of quality at very fair pricing then please look here - this is a winery that is seriously approachable, serious quality and serious fun.