99 points - “Deep black and dark red colour with touches of purple. There is a sweet and beautiful spicy freshness and energy that bursts from the glass. This wine is about feel, and there is a saline minerality and alkaline character combining with an almost glazed shimmering sheen. It is a wine that is both detailed and expansive with layered revealing textures and flavours burning within. The fruit is from dry-grown vertically trellised vines on the Powerbark and Wilson’s Pool vineyards. And the detail comes from the hand-picking, berry-sorting approach before gravity feeding the two demi muids with a 55 per cent whole bunch component. A remarkable wine that challenges our greatest shiraz albeit with a stylistic difference.” - Ray Jordan (businessnews.com.au)

97+ points - "The 2023 Farvie Syrah is streamlined and tightly coiled, with layers of compacted red gravel, dried rose petals, blood and licorice, dried herbs and caper brine, tapenade and sandalwood. This is all blue fruit; the tannins are firm but very fine, profuse without being overbearing and all derived from the fruit and stems (approximately 60% in 2023). At 13.9% alcohol, this is fine, fresh and bloody, and it's so exciting to feel, as the tannins are everything we could hope for, as fine wine lovers, seamlessly integrated and natural, contributing to the overall effortlessness of the wine. Bravo." - Erin Larkin (The Wine Advocate)

97 points - “A little reductive at first, plum skin and salted licorice, pipe tobacco and beef broth. Black olive and boot polish. Savoury, tight, earthy. With time, black and blue berries emerge, and the wine takes on a little flesh as well. But a firm, ironstone spine remains. Incredible focus and precision.” - Nick Ryan (The Weekend Australian)

96 points - “A magnificent syrah with dark fruits, charry spice, licorice, leafy herbal nuance, brined olive notes and distinct minerality on show. It feels medium bodied but the concentration and slip of meaty tannin lends fullness to the pitch-perfect mid-bodied feel. Tannins keep the wine slippery, refreshing, fine-tuned and draw the wine long. There’s a distinction and elegance at play. Perfumed, supple, incredibly layered syrah with regional typicity at the forefront. Take a bow.” - Mike Bennie (The Wine Companion)

96 points - "Black fruit, cherry, liquorice, black olive and dark tobacco, a lavender, dried herb and vanilla perfume. It’s medium-bodied, packed with ferrous/ironstone things, a cool ‘mineral’ feel to acidity, sooty tannin, blue and black fruit compote, with a nutty and saline finish of excellent length. It’s compact, tight and coiled up like a spring. Exemplary Shiraz." - Gary Walsh (The Wine Front)

20+/20 points - “… This is a quiet assassin, and the tension throughout is remarkable. It is not easy to determine the grape variety on first taste, and nor should it be because the vineyard and its intense minerality speak louder than the flesh and skins of the grapes. The frictive layers of anti-fruit silently fall away to reveal a spectacular statuesque Syrah. Toned, lithe, brightly fruited and yet immovable, there is not a molecule out of place, and it stands riveted to the spot with a commanding gaze and unshakable temperament.” - Matthew Jukes (matthewjukes.com)

The 2023 Farvie was hand-harvested from a parcel of vines planted to Jack Mann’s heritage mass-selection Syrah. In the relatively cooler conditions of 2023, the wine is marked by a distinct Szechuan pepper, Cornas-like spice and structure, according to Mann. The fruit was sorted berry by berry in the winery, and again, in response to the cooler conditions, the bunch component was kept at a well-judged 55% (warmer years have seen up to 65% inclusion), to highlight the wine’s lightness of texture while also encouraging bright, spicy aromatics. Everything was gravity-fed to a French oak vat and demi-muids for wild fermentation. The wine spent 15 days on skins before being pressed to large, fine-grained, seasoned French oak, where it rested for 10 months before bottling.

Mann fosters the Farvie plot’s innate savoury, ironstone and ferrous character, pushing it to take a lead role in the wine. Importantly, no new oak is used in the Farvie Syrah. “I’m more interested in perfume, florals and personality than I am in the wine having heavy density and richness,” he explains. “By using no new oak, you have to think a bit harder about how to build complexity, structure and perfume in Syrah,” he goes on. “We build that complexity through viticulture, bunches and time on lees.”