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Producer
Grosset -
Region
Clare Valley
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RRP
$58
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Vintage
2025
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Variety/Varieties
Riesling
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Alc./Vol.
12.3%
Think beeswax with lime zest, green apple and a squeeze of tonic water, with a silky, mouth-watering finish that has you reaching for the next sip before you’ve swallowed the last. Dry, fresh, and dangerously drinkable.
Springvale sits within Grosset’s larger Watervale vineyard in the Clare Valley, a 5.3-hectare pocket planted in 2001 at 450–470 metres — among the highest sites in the district. What makes it extraordinary wasn’t visible on any map when the vines went in: red-brown clay over limestone, and three metres down, an unexpected seam of blue slate. Viticulturist Matthew O’Rourke, who has worked the site since 2011, explains that the slate acts as a natural barrier, limiting root penetration and concentrating what the vines can draw up — while the limestone beneath buffers pH and lends the wine its mineral spine.
The vineyard has been certified organic since 2014 and biodynamic since 2019, farmed as a living ecosystem rather than a production line. Densely planted and deliberately low-yielding, it produces small volumes of intensely concentrated fruit. Grosset and O’Rourke both point to something they’ve only recently begun to see: a silky phenolic texture in the wine that wasn’t there twenty years ago, one they attribute to the vineyard’s deepening biodynamic rhythm. The result sells out every year it’s released — and in 2026, Springvale was named Young Gun of Wine’s Vineyard of the Year.
Tasting note
There’s a whiff of struck match on first pour, the kind of reductive spark that tells you something serious is going on underneath — before it gives way to gardenias, lime zest, fuzzy white peach and beeswax. Gala apple, lightly dusted with cinnamon, hovers in the background. On the palate it’s citrus through and through: lime pith and lemon balm sliding into yellow apple and pear, all wrapped in a chalky, silky texture that frames rather than fights the fruit. It’s dry, it’s precise, and it carries real concentration — a product of the warm, early season pushing ripeness while the site’s natural tension keeps everything honest.
Riesling’s calling card is acidity, and Springvale has it in spades — but resist the urge to drink this too cold, too fast. Let it sit and warm a little in the glass; the acid softens, the texture opens up, and the wine reveals more of itself with every ten minutes. However you approach it, it’s a mouth-watering, faintly hypnotic drink that rewards a bit of patience.
When to drink
This is the sort of wine you can bust out as an aperitif with salty snacks at a dinner party where you’re trying to impress. Or take it along to a sprawling spring lunch with mates over picnic blankets and shared plates — those prawn-stuffed rice paper rolls you brought will vanish within minutes of opening this. But it doesn’t need any of that to justify itself either. Pour it on a hot afternoon when you’ve got nowhere to be, or crack it open solo after a long day, chilled right down and sipped slowly while it warms in the glass and shows you something new each time. Think of it less as a pairing exercise and more as a mood: bright, cleansing, a little bit contemplative.
Themes of this wine
Riesling
Riesling is one of the world’s most versatile grapes, capable of making styles from aridly dry to lusciously sweet, plus everything in between, and with a transparency that reflects where it was grown like few – if any – other grapes. Hailing from Germany, it’s equally embedded in France and Austria, while the style made famous in the Clare Valley that once defined Australian versions has now been joined by a multitude of expressions, and from right across the country.
Clare Valley
A couple of hours north of Adelaide, the Clare Valley is home to some of Australia’s most famous riesling vineyards, with the grape accounting for almost 40 per cent of the plantings, with shiraz a close second, though cabernet sauvignon is also made to good acclaim. The soils vary across the five subregions, from terra rossa over limestone, to grey loams over slate, to fertile alluvial soils in the north. With a continental climate, the warm conditions benefit from the cool nights, retaining acidity in the grapes while the ample sunlight pushes the fruit to ripeness during the day.
Biodynamic farming
Biodynamics takes organic viticulture a step further, treating the vineyard as a single, self-sustaining organism rather than a collection of separate inputs to manage. Developed from the early twentieth-century teachings of Rudolf Steiner, it works with composts, herbal preparations and the lunar and cosmic calendar in place of synthetic sprays and fertilisers. In Australia it remains a minority pursuit, practised by only a small handful of producers, but a growing one – embraced by growers chasing greater
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