95 points - "Deeply coloured and one of the broodier examples of Peter's wines with deep, wonderfully pure blackberry, black cherry and Doris plum fruits, cut with clove, bay leaf, crushed rock, dark chocolate bullets, black tea, meadow herbs, olive tapenade and roast meats. Purely fruited with a crushed rock savouriness, great length of flavour and a bright seam of acidity that lifts everything up on the finish." - Dave Brookes (Halliday Wine Companion)

94 points - "This is a Barossa Shiraz for all-comers. It’s bold, rich and flavoursome but it’s also complex and tannic. It gives and it gets. It tastes of peanut shells and saturated plums, fragrant herbs, raisins, purple flowers, a ferrous note and red licorice. It carries a keen spread of tannin but this tannin is drenched in fruit flavour. In short, it delivers lashings of flavour in serious style." - Campbell Mattinson (The Wine Front)

A bête noire is the bane of one’s existence, an apt reference to the multitude of small parcels that go into this blend. Pete Schell’s ‘22 is a blend of old-vine Shiraz from the Barossa and Eden valleys, specifically, six different parcels from the sub-regions of Moppa, High Eden, Light Pass and the Eastern Foothills. Soils vary across the sites, from thin, skeletal sandy loams in the loftier plots to the classic sand-over-red-clay in the Moppa and Light Pass regions. Vineyard age ranges between 25 and 110 years, with “45 years being a fair average across the blend”, Schell reckons. So, 100% old-vine Shiraz from a great vintage in the hands of a master blender. Wonder how this is going to turn out…

The proportion of whole clusters varied from “everything to nothing” depending on the vineyard, with roughly 35% in the final blend. Maturation occurred in 35% new French barrels―ranging in capacity from 225-litre to 4500-litre―for 20 months before fining without filtration.

Inspired by the classically styled Barossa reds from the 1970s and ’80s (bottles plundered from friends’ parents’ cellars), it’s a refined, medium-bodied, detailed and aromatic wine. The old-world feel is strong with this one. This packs a serious punch, with a supple core of black and red fruit and veins of aromatic spice and savouriness. It’s rich, silky and powerful power in pitch-perfect measure. An incredible bargain, as usual.