MMAD Vineyard Shiraz 2024

97 POINTS

Shanteh Wale - Winepilot

A briar of black fruit and savoury, creeping herbs—bilberry, dark cherry and pepperberry layered with notes of kombu, coastal rosemary and wild, untamed greens. There’s an earthiness here too: turned soil and dark, stony sand grounding the aromatic lift. I t feels like an afternoon bush walk—banksia brushing past, scrub at your ankles—so vivid is its sense of place and transportive quality. Powder-fine tannins settle gently through the mid-palate, while olive tapenade, nigella seed and a touch of twiggy oak lend structure and savoury detail, supporting the core of blackberry fruit. This is full flavoured, detailed with its own distinctive character but sits in a medium to full body for its freshness and brightness. You won’t forget this experience any time soon. Try this with Lamb chops and old school mint sauce and reinvent the marriage of the two. Old school dish and very new school modern wine.

97 POINTS

Marcus Ellis - Halliday Wine Companion

This has been the surprise packet of the MMAD wines, with it duelling for position with the grenache and chenin blanc. Some whole bunch, concrete and oak vat for ferment, then raised in older, larger oak, as usual. Saint-Joseph resonances. Evocatively aromatic and spicily so. Smoky, darkly mineral. Blackberry pastille, tapenade, lavender, grilled game meat, crème de violette, iodine and nori, star anise, ground clove, allspice, green and black peppercorns, malted barley, freshly ground coffee, powdery rust. Like the grenache, the nose holds such intrigue, demands attention. That’s matched by the silky flow of the old-vine fruit on the palate and the superfine natural tannin. This is blisteringly good, again.

97 POINTS

Jeni Port - Winepilot

Blewitt Springs is an island, part of McLaren Vale and yet separate, thanks to its Maslin sands and iron rich soils. Year after year, decade after decade, it gets its moment to shine with Shiraz. Here, florals swirl amid dark spices, black tea scents and dark cherry, plum. It’s a complex introduction. Black peppery notes lead the way into a rich, highly spiced palate laced in florals and delivered on a bed of ripe dark berries with background leather notes and hints of nutty vanillin. Quite a stunning array of fruit concentration and intensity with real energy in those savoury firm and integrated tannins.

90 POINTS

Gary Walsh - The Wine Front

Often a difficult wine for me. Put in front of twelve people, true and fair, and one loved it, and confessed to being a lover of smoky whisky, and the rest made comments about burning rubber and meat. Anyway, here we are. They decided to come back to it. I did. It improved a bit. Black fruit, grilled meat rolled in dried herbs, some subdued floral notes, liquorice, beer nuts and tomato paste. It’s medium-bodied, all meat and dried herbs, distinctly reductive and earthy, a grainy grip to tannin, with a somewhat bitter herbal finish of good length. It may come good, and I can see some good things about it, but it’s a hard wine for me to love. And it feels hard and ungiving. Also hard to rate. Stylistically, not my cup of tea anyway.