2022 Shaw & Smith Balhannah Vineyard Shiraz

95 POINTS

Jeni Port - winepilot.com

Offers a reflection of local terroir with a telling and highly attractive touch of Hills’ acacia, briar, mint and earth snuggling up to ripe black fruits and an array of spices.  Runs long across the palate opening up to cedary oak nicely integrated among the fruits, spice and featuring an intriguing marzipan-like savouriness before finishing with a touch of bright black pepperiness. That peppery feature helps lift what is some seriously concentrated, deep flavour. A wine that really asks for more time in bottle.

95 POINTS

Gary Walsh - The Wine Front

Planted in 2005. If ever there were a CM styled Shiraz… There’s a lot going on here, that’s for sure. It’s a mesh of ripe blue and black fruit, grilled meat, pepper and spice, dried herbs and juniper berry, seaweed, and dried flower perfume. It’s medium-bodied, meaty and spicy, sweet fruit but also strewn with aromatic spice and herb, tannin is grainy and silty, and there’s something of an olive tapenade thing, and gentle bitterness of orange peel, almost Negroni-like, and the finish is long with plenty of grip and extract. Very good. As an aside, stylistically this might be called ‘Syrah’, though I like that S+S have stuck to the knitting and kept its Australian name.

92 POINTS

Mike Bennie - Halliday's Wine Companion

Distinct with its game meat and bloody, savoury qualities, with brick dust, splintery wood and associated woody spice, black pepper, green olives and salted licorice in the mix. Of course, fruit is present – dark cherry, black plum – but geez this is orientated to non-fruit characters. Grippy, granitic tannins weave through the leaner fruit profile of the palate. A sense of inkiness, though it seems to sit at medium weight. It feels out of balance with its drying, woody, sinewy elements presently, and fruit is currently back seat. Give it time, perhaps.

91 POINTS

Erin Larkin - Wine Advocate

The 2022 Balhannah Vineyard Shiraz is reductive upon opening and leads with cassis and dark chocolate, blueberry, dried mint, pencil shavings and crushed rocks. There's an air of butcher shop about it as well, which evolves and grows in time. The palate is shaped by cocoa-powder tannins and fresh acidity, with licorice and black cherries to close. The reduction is quite pronounced, even after some diligent swirling. Whether or not you enjoy this character is a personal preference, but I do enjoy it a little, and I enjoy it more once it departs. 14% alcohol, sealed under screw cap.