Regan Drew

Wine Pilot 95 Points

Gundagai is better known as a highway stop between major cities, enshrined in Australian folk song legend and home to the Dog On The Tuckerbox. Nick Spencer started sourcing fruit from this yet-to-be-household-name region over a decade ago and it’s a vital source of quality grapes. Here the LDR (Light Dry Red) is a 50/50 nod to an old Australian blend of Shiraz (Gundagai) and Pinot Noir (Tumbarumba and a little Gundagai fruit) seeing a renaissance. Deep garnet hue: serious nose of just opened dried cranberry packet, packed cherries in their juice, deep red English cabbage rose petal, ermine velvet, a little herby thyme, plum sauce, char and with vanilla pod licks and creamed coffee comfort. Elegance, etching, filagree, delicacy, style, class. Just medium weight but with such intensity of balanced flavour: neither variety dominates, but harmonises with the other.

Jane Faulkner

Halliday Wine Companion 95 Points

This is an equal blend of shiraz and pinot noir with fruit sourced from Gundagai. It’s a beauty, and perhaps more mid-weighted than light, but it’s certainly not a dense or heavy wine. Lovely aromatics – all spicy, floral and savoury – with red cherries, plums, hints of raspberries and loganberries, too. The palate is coated with fine tannins, and lithe acidity leads this to a convincing finish. Oak is not a factor, so it’s unencumbered, and the result is a delicious drink.

Campbell Mattinson

The Wine Front 94 Points

This is exquisite. It’s a delicacy. It’s fine and floral and spicy and berried, its flavours built on acidity, its nuances intricate. This is the polar opposite of the smack-you-in-the-face red wine style. It’s just itself, light to medium in weight, of the garden, summer berries glancing over at autumn, some apple to the acidity, its charm somewhere between studied and neglected. It won’t be everyone’s cuppa I guess, you have to slow down and take a listen to it, but for me personally this wine brings joy into the room.

Nick Ryan

The Weekend Australian 95 Points

Here’s a wine harking back to Australia’s cardigan-clad past that just happens to be incredibly contemporary too. Learning some of the fruit is grown around Gundagai instantly puts an old folk tune in your head, but that’s just the beginning of the nostalgia trip. Its varietal composition – pinot noir and shiraz – and its unashamedly svelte shape are a nod to the classic ‘Burgundies’ we made around the middle of the last century. Sometimes nostalgia is a noose, but here it’s a look back that takes us forward.