James Halliday’s Top 100 wines: Grand plan to bottle vintage dreams

Georgia Dale personifies the gung-ho attitude common among the winemakers who made James Halliday’s Top 100 wine list for 2022.

Georgia Dale scoops up shiraz grape skins. Picture: Victor Pugatschew

Georgia Dale’s wine label XI.XI (pronounced Eleven Eleven) may be only three years old, and a small player among the giants of Victoria’s Yarra Valley, but she has a grand plan.

Dale dreams of becoming a renowned producer of blanc de blancs – a sparkling wine made with white grapes in the traditional French method.

There’s a sort of alchemy to the process. “You never know quite what you’re going to get … there’s a kind of magic in that,” she says.

Dale, 35, personifies the gung-ho, can-do-anything attitude that is a common thread running through the winemakers who feature in James Halliday’s Top 100 wine list, published in The Weekend Australian Magazine today. She loves making reds, too. They’re bankrolling the ­operation until the first of her blanc de blancs, the 2020 vintage, is released in 2024. There’ll be a release every year after that, and she’ll be on her way.

“I can’t wait,” she beams.

THE LIST: HALLIDAY’S TOP 100 WINES OF 2022

The Weekend Australian Magazine’s annual list of the ­nation’s best whites, reds, sparkling and champagne emerges out of a tough few years for the Australian wine industry – the 2019 bushfires and resultant smoke taint, incessant La Nina rain and flooding, the collapse in the wine export market to China, the prospect of global recession and the ever-present menace of Covid combined present an unprecedented challenge. Yet despite it all, the Australian wine industry continues to perform mightily.

This year’s Top 100, which judged 941 wines, is a reflection of the outstanding work of Australia’s growers and winemakers, who have risen against the odds to produce excellent vintages in 2021 and 2022. Halliday says: “The high quality of the wines was underwritten by the strength of white from 2022, especially in the under $30 category, and by the great 2021 vintage (particularly for reds).”

Alongside our unparalleled coverage of wines sits Peter Lalor’s list of best craft beers and for the first time, Nick Ryan’s guide to the best spirits, spotlighting craft distilling, New World whisky and Mexican mezcal.