Like 2017, 2022 is clearly a great vintage for the dry rieslings from the Eden Valley and Clare Valley, South Australia’s two premier regions for this grape.To deepen our perspective on current developments in the Australian wine industry, Senior Editor Stuart Pigott was one of the judges in the Clare Valley Wine Show.
“It was the ideal moment to do this, because I got to taste more than 50 dry rieslings from the 2022 vintage blind, and there were some shining stars among them,” Stuart said.
The best of them for him was the Mitchell Riesling Clare Valley Watervale 2022, which is aromatically and more texturally complex than the linear and lime-flavored style of Australian riesling often considered classic. The sensationally fresh Mitchell Riesling Clare Valley Watervale 2002, one of the first to be bottled under the Stelvin screw cap closure, demonstrated how spectacularly the best vintages of these wines age in bottle.
Outside the Clare Valley Wine Show, Stuart was also wowed by the Grosset Riesling Clare Valley Polish Hill 2022, a super-concentrated and expressively mineral wine. It’s the highest-rated dry riesling in this report. The trend toward more generosity in dry riesling was also clearly apparent in the Great Southern, the remote region of Western Australia where Stuart traveled after the Clare Valley Wine Show. There, too, he was able to taste a broad spectrum of the region’s dry rieslings.