Grosset

Grosset Wines is the benchmark producer of Australian Riesling, a small Clare Valley estate whose Polish Hill bottling is, for many critics, the finest dry Riesling made in the country. It is also the estate most responsible for one of the most consequential technical changes in modern Australian wine.

A Riesling specialist in the Clare

Jeffrey Grosset founded the winery in 1981, working out of a former butter-and-ice factory in the town of Auburn, at the southern end of the Clare Valley. From that first vintage he released two single-vineyard dry Rieslings that he has made every year since: Watervale, from the Springvale vineyard on limestone-rich soils, and Polish Hill, from the harder slate and siltstone ground of the Polish Hill River sub-region. The two are a study in how soil shapes a wine — Watervale rounder and more overtly citrus, Polish Hill tighter, flintier and slower to unwind.

The Clare Valley works for Riesling the way the diurnal range works everywhere: warm days ripen the fruit while cold nights preserve the searing natural acidity that gives these bone-dry wines their drive and their decades-long ageing curve. Grosset farms organically, and the wines are built for the cellar — austere and coiled in youth, unfolding lime, toast and honey with age.

The screwcap revolution

Grosset’s influence reaches well beyond his own labels. In 2000, Jeffrey Grosset was the driving force behind a collective decision by Clare Valley Riesling producers to abandon cork in favour of the screwcap — then a radical, image-risking move. The reasoning was technical and exactly suited to the grape: Riesling’s whole appeal is its purity and its slow, reductive development over many years, and cork’s variability (oxidation, taint) was the single biggest threat to that. The screwcap gave a clean, consistent, oxygen-controlled seal.

The Clare initiative worked, and the practice spread until the screwcap became the Australian and New Zealand norm for age-worthy whites — a rare case of a wine region changing global industry practice. For Riesling especially, it is the reason a twenty-year-old bottle can be relied upon to show the wine the maker intended.

Standing

The Polish Hill Riesling sits at the top tier — “Exceptional” — of the Langton’s Classification of Australian Wine, the peer benchmark for the country’s most collected bottles, and Grosset remains the reference point against which other Australian Riesling is measured.