VIP Baker's Dozen inc. 3 Super Premium Legends

First made in 1970, Eileen Hardy McLaren Vale Shiraz is one of Australia's great wines. There was a bit of a blip in the 80s when the winemaking team experimented with low baume, low alcohol ferments. These smelled incredible while fermenting but were ultimately anemic in bottle and the experiment was short lived. This is complex, powerful and yet accessible. Black fruits, plum, mulberry, blackberry, graphite, smoked meats, iron and more happening here. Power with elegance, fine tannins and magnificent oak respectfully applied.

Unequivocally the finest of the five vintages of Revelation that have been released between 2010 and 2024, this is made in tiny quantities; fewer than 3,000 bottles were produced of this flagship Kilikanoon Shiraz.

Old Block is one of the Barossa resurgence Original Gangsters! The first vintage was made by Robert O' Callaghan who released his inaugural Basket Press Shiraz just a few years later - this was a wine that swam against the tide. From old vines, when old vines were uncommercial and in danger of being uprooted. Incredibly high quality and relatively expensive at a time when high-end wine consumption in Aus was not yet commonplace. Big but elegant - powerful yet refined. Cassis, satsuma, coffee, chocolate, black pepper, black cherry, liquorice, spice, cedar and fine tannins. A Barossa benchmark!

Just the fifth release of Yaldara Grand, and arguably the one which has struck a balance between power and elegance most deftly. Milk and dark chocolate, aniseed, black and blue fruits, tobacco leaf, plus plenty of cedary oak and tannin. Magical.

Opulent and sense-flooding. Aromas of gunsmoke, cedar, dark chocolate, coffee, meat stock and spice weave through rich waves of blueberry, black pepper and liquorice. It’s brooding, heady and powerful—Barossa at full throttle.

There’s something about the Australian Cabernet–Shiraz blend — a partnership that’s rare elsewhere in the world — that just works here.

For two decades, Matthew Jukes and Tyson Stelzer ran the annual Great Australian Wine Challenge because, as they put it, “The Cabernet Shiraz blend is Australia’s definitive wine style — its only truly unique and ageworthy flagbearer to stand confidently alongside the benchmark reds of Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Rhône, Piedmont, Tuscany and California.”

We couldn’t agree more at WD, and this Eos is a world-class expression of the style: succulent blue and purple fruits, layers of chocolate, liquorice and plum, all wrapped up in a truckload of fine, powdery tannins and cedary oak.

Cape Jaffa were an early adopter of biodynamic viticulture in Australia, having over 30 years experience of managing their vines this way. We reckon that Mount Benson, where they grow their Shiraz, is capable of making incredible, world class wines. It's a heady combo, and the La Lune is a superb wine. Here's what Campbell Mattinson said.

'It’s an enormously complex wine. It’s strewn with tobacco, tomato leaf, earth, smoked meats, autumn leaf and sweet spice notes, though the main run of it is all red and black cherry fruit flavours, with modest dips into deeper, darker plum characters. There’s a soy sauce character to the nose and a smoked cedar flavour to the palate, though at all times the wine feels svelte. It’s a complex wine but it’s also a polished one.'

This is sourced entirely from old, estate grown, ungrafted Barossa vines. The fruit from these gnarly old vines is handpicked before whole bunch fermentation in open fermenters, then pressed into French oak where it spends 15 months. It has an elegant, fragrant nose with plenty of spice and perfume. The palate is bright, but underscored with old vine, black fruited gravitas. Exceptional.