97 POINTS
Marcus Ellis - Halliday Wine Companion
'22 was a cool year that produced some reticent but excellent grenache, while shiraz seemed to sail through untroubled. This is an infant, of course, but there’s a ready appeal not always seen at this stage, a meshing of red, blue and black fruits – ripe raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, tart boysenberry, red plum, black olive – with an overlay of baking spices, iodine, coffee grounds and beef bouillon. And iron, yes. It’s on the label. In the ground. In the wine. Here, the wine benefits from that soil transfer being elegant, filigreed, not rugged. It needs a little time to be its best, but it’s a superb release.
96 POINTS
Tom Kline - Winepilot
The 2022 release of Yangarra’s top Shiraz states its position and makes you listen to it. A brooding iodine and, dare I say, ‘iron-like’ minerality sits deep and restrained first off before an unfurling of charred herbs, woodsmoke, nutmeg, cassia bark and a glimmer of menthol. Black cherry, blackberry pastille and damson plum make an appearance following some aeration, alongside earth, gentle mocha, clove and dark chocolate. This has a dramatic sensibility – it’s deep and dark with excellent restraint and control. The palate runs a dichotomy of a cooling, ferrous mineral feel alongside dark, febrile power. It strides through the mouth with unabated assurance and lashings of dark cherry, mocha, earth, dark chocolate, blackberry, cassia and dried herbs. The tannins are vertical, stacked and grainy providing a funnel for the complex power to coil within. There’s seemingly endless length to this wine. It’s powerful and of course youthful, but any risk of heftiness is cut up and lifted by mineral detail and pulled into focus and precision by architectural structure. All of this paired with kaleidoscopic complexity makes for a wine of incontrovertible brilliance.
96 POINTS
Ray Jordan - Winepilot
The colour is deep and bright. Intense and concentrated aromas of dark plum and blackberry augmented with a slightly savoury dried herb influence topped by a little fruit cake richness. A powerful and concentrated palate that delivers with typical finesse that comes from the mix of larger format oaks and just a small amount of light pressings. A most attractive wine.
Floral and perfumed with an underlying power, showing notes of mulberries, wild blackberries, Damson plums and cured meat. The palate is full-bodied with seamless tannins and bright acidity, giving robust notes of dark cherries, iodine, mocha, violets and ferric earth. Well balanced and structured. Very serious.
96 POINTS
Angus Hughson - Vinous
The expressive 2022 Shiraz Ironheart is rich yet measured with a powerfully expressive core of bloody ferrous aromas lifted by dark earth and crushed spice tones. There is a finer side—touches of dried violet, white pepper and coal fire— with significant underlying tension as it tightens up on the long, enthralling close.
95 POINTS
Shanteh Wale - Winepilot
Grown on ironstone gravel soils, the fruit sees open fermenters and 21 days on skins before maturation in French and Austrian oak for 19 months. A shrub of black cherries, wild hawthorn, and mulberries meets olive flecks, woodsy herbs, and crushed black peppercorns. There’s a sliver of purple flowers and dots of pen ink. The palate is buoyant, lifted by lively acidity, which gives way to well-integrated oak and whole-bunch tannins. This sits in the sweet spot of a Venn diagram—moderate-climate Shiraz with Syrah-like spice and herbal lift. It’s drinking beautifully now, but it’s been crafted with a long view, promising further reward over the next 5–8 years. A glass or two alongside the chew and game of lamb cutlets would be just the thing.
95 POINTS
Erin Larkin - Robert Parker Wine Advocate
The 2022 Ironheart Shiraz leads with sumac and soaked raspberries, creamy dark berries, exotic spice and tapenade. The oak makes an impact on the nose: it contributes an oatmeal character, reminiscent of malt biscuits and scraped vanilla bean. Nothing on this earth is getting in the way of or obscuring that saturated fruit concentration, however. Fine, silty tannins like volcanic sand shape the flow of flavor across the palate, and all elements feel eminently black and shadowy. It's tannic, which reflects the vintage, structural and inky. It's a powerhouse. It matured in a combination of French and Austrian oak for 19 months—for 12 months, the fruit remains on lees in puncheon (35% new), and the remaining seven months are spent as a blended whole in a two-year-old 25-hectoliter foudre. 14% alcohol, sealed under screw cap.
93 POINTS
Gary Walsh - The Wine Front
CM seems to have reviewed all the Yangarra wines recently, aside this. Well, that gives me pause! Maybe he never opened this bottle in the rush to get to the Grenache and white wines, and I’d support that, given I feel Shiraz sits a little lower in the pantheon of their wines. Did I manage to murder grammar and a classical allusion in the last sentence? I feel that I may have. Oh well. Anyway, I feel that Shiraz is a bit too salty from this region, whereas Grenache does not seem to suffer so much from that. I am, admittedly, over sensitive to salty characters in red wine.
Blackberry, blueberry, iodine and salty things, black olive, some lavender and dried herb. It’s medium-bodied, kind of dry and full of black olive and beef stock, the tannin is of excellent quality, ferrous and tightly knit, density of fruit is something, with some dried raspberry sweetness, offering a finish of excellent length. I like the structure and oomph of the wine, though it’s perhaps too saline for something that I’d go for more than a glass of. Just me maybe. Still, good wine.
