Five value wines from Top Wineries
Huon Hooke in Top Wineries Become a member to view this article
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Martin and Karen Spedding of Ten Minutes By Tractor Wines. Ten Minutes By Tractor
The highest ranked wineries in The Real Review’s Top Wineries of Australia 2025 have many expensive, famous and often rare wines, but here’s a list of five wines everybody can afford to buy and enjoy.
My personal selection of five value bottles from the Top Wineries list:
Ten Minutes by Tractor 10X Chardonnay 2023, AUD $38
Top Wineries rank: #20
A remarkable wine which possesses many of the attributes of this exalted Mornington Peninsula winery’s much more expensive single-vineyard chardonnays, which are AUD $90. It’s a blend of seven vineyards, wild fermented and matured in barrels, 11% of which were new. Toasty, buttery, crusty bread and buttery croissant barrel-fermented aromas, gliding with medium-light body and silky texture.
Torbreck Woodcutter’s Shiraz 2023, AUD $29
Top Wineries rank: #25
Torbreck has a treasure trove of very expensive Barossa Valley red wines, peaking with The Laird Shiraz at nearly AUD $900. This very inexpensive shiraz offers some of the generosity of flavour and ripe plummy, meaty, earthy characters of its famous big brothers. It has that glass-staining purple colour, full body and almost jammy fruit characters that Torbreck fans love.
Jim Barry Lodge Hill Riesling 2024, AUD $28
Top Wineries rank: #27
The Clare Valley is the first place to look for riesling and every winery offers some bottles at seriously modest prices. This single-vineyard wine has the limy nuances that define Clare riesling along with pastry, quartz and seaspray touches, a refreshingly dry, balanced finish and while it’s lovely now, it will evolve and build complexity for at least a decade.
Yangarra Old Vine GSM Grenache Shiraz Mourvèdre 2023, AUD $38
Top Wineries rank: #28
Yangarra is an outstanding winery perched at the top of the McLaren Vale region near Clarendon, where it grows sensational grenache, shiraz and mataro/mourvèdre, some of the labels quite costly—its top grenache, High Sands, is AUD $325. This GSM is perennially excellent value, with bold chocolate-coated liquorice, vanilla and dark plum flavours, the palate rich and supple with glossy tannins.
Chandon Vintage Blanc de Blancs 2018, AUD $48
Top Wineries rank: #145
Really smart sparkling wine is nearly always more expensive than the equivalent in still wine, but Chandon does a great job of serving up value in its non-vintage range. Just a few dollars more will buy you a vintage wine, and this pure chardonnay blanc de blancs is a lovely, elegant wine, with intense aromas and flavours of toasted bread and stone fruits including peach and nectarine.
Finding value in Top Wineries
