2021 Yangarra High Sands Grenache

98 POINTS

Stuart Knox - The Real Review

Medium ruby-red with a bright purple tone. Raspberry, Turkish Delight and Chinese fivespice aromatics. Palate is seamless and silken: red fruits, exotic spices, dry earth and rose petals all flow across the palate, all entwined with a fine net of acidity and tannin that lifts and drives it. The never-ending finish is a chorus of fruit and spice with the finest grained but persistent tannins ensuring you keep returning to admire it.

98 POINTS

2024 Halliday Wine Companion

High Sands is always a landmark wine, a site-reflective icon of peerless husbandry and elaboration, but it can be imposing, needing time and reflection. This is different, though, finely tuned, lucid, silky and sophisticated, and feeling even more expressive of place. A great, cool vintage, yes, with both depth and levity, but Pete Fraser’s quarter turns of the screw are also palpable. Fruits are red and black, ripe but with some tart wild tension, dusted in heady baharat spicing, the heartbeat of old-vine power pulsing insistently within. Flavour descriptors feel ineffectual, though. It’s the sheer graceful power of the thing that’s so beguiling, as it noiselessly swoops in, catching you in the updraft of its immense wingspan. By any measure, this is a great wine.

94 POINTS

Gary Walsh - The Wine Front

Cherry, raspberry, biscuit spice and mint/menthol, saline too, with a rosy perfume. It’s a bold wine, and the spicy oak certainly shows some impact (especially after tasting the Ovitelli), there’s a lot of grip and flesh to tannin, and there’s something of a sizzled sage leaf flavour in the wine too. Maybe it’s a little bit warm in alcohol, and the tannin feels a little furry, though there’s no shortage of flavour and impact, and its length and power augers well for time in the cellar. 94+ points.