Pinot noir was the standout variety this year at Wine By Farr, in the Geelong region’s Moorabool Valley.Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen
More than 400 wineries were surveyed and 10,000 wines tasted for this year’s The Real Review Top Wineries list. Here we present the cream of that crop, along with the six top drops. And the verdict on the state of Australian wine? It’s never been better.
1. Wine By Farr
LOCATION: Geelong, Vic
BEST KNOWN FOR: Pinot noir and chardonnay are the main game at the Farr family’s Moorabool Valley property, with shiraz, viognier and gamay the support acts.
HUON SAYS: Powerful yet elegant pinot noir, cast in a distinctive mould and bottled under several vineyard names (Côte Vineyard, Sangreal, Tout Près and Farrside), gave By Farr the edge this year, the 2022 vintage shining especially brightly. The 2023 Côte Vineyard Chardonnay also thrilled, but the shiraz and viognier were also blindingly good.
2. Yarra Yering
Yarra Yering, Yarra Valley, Vic.Credit: Hugh Davison
LOCATION: Yarra Valley, Vic
BEST KNOWN FOR: A blend of cabernet sauvignon and other Bordeaux red grapes cutely named Dry Red Wine No. 1 and, increasingly, fabulous shirazes as well.
HUON SAYS: Sarah Crowe is a star, not only an impeccable producer of elegant shiraz, cabernet, pinot noir, chardonnay and viognier, but a leading wine industry figure who gives a lot of time to wine-show judging and mentoring. The rising stars in the portfolio are the Underhill shiraz and the Dry Red Wine No. 3, a blend of Portuguese red varieties.
3. Levantine Hill
Levantine Hill, Yarra Valley, Vic.Credit: Image Play
LOCATION: Yarra Valley, Vic
BEST KNOWN FOR: The jaw-dropping prices, the lavish restaurant, the cellar door and winery – and, yes, also the superb wines across the key regional varieties.
HUON SAYS: Paul Bridgeman’s wines – chardonnay, shiraz, pinot noir, sweet white, sparkling and a superb cabernet blend named Samantha’s Paddock – make a statement. Levantine Hill’s wines made their debut just 11 years ago and their quality and style, which incorporates extra pre-release age, back up the prices that set the bar high.
4. Giant Steps
Giant Steps, Yarra Valley, Vic.Credit: Giant Steps
LOCATION: Yarra Valley, Vic
BEST KNOWN FOR: Exquisite vineyard-designated pinot noirs, chardonnays and shiraz from various parts of the Yarra Valley, but with an emphasis on the high country.
HUON SAYS: Hauntingly beautiful wines emanate from this super-savvy Yarra winery, the Applejack Vineyard proving year after year that it’s the jewel in the crown, but Primavera, Sexton and the more recently acquired Bastard Hill Vineyard are also yielding sensational wines. There’s an outstanding Tarraford syrah for good measure, too.
5. Wynns Coonawarra Estate
Wynns Coonawarra Estate, Coonawarra, SA.Credit: John Krüger
LOCATION: Coonawarra, SA
BEST KNOWN FOR: Cabernet sauvignon, for which Wynns is Coonawarra’s standard-bearer, under a profusion of labels at various price points.
HUON SAYS: The iconic John Riddoch cabernet sauvignon is one of Australia’s finest, supported by a different single-vineyard cabernet bottling every year (2022 Childs is the current), while the Black Label cabernet is the wine that’s in every wine lover’s cellar. The new vintage 2023 is rebadged The Original: its history goes back to the 1954 vintage.
Gareth Belton has, by his own admission, an uncanny ability to recall the taste and backstory of most of the wines he has sampled in his relatively short life. “It’s funny,” he says, “I have the worst brain in the world, but can remember everything about most of the wine I have ever tasted.”
It was a skill deployed regularly even as he spent his days collecting different types of seaweed while completing a PhD in marine science. Wine was a hobby, though somewhat more encompassing and passionate than most people’s love of a good drop. “I loved the stories behind the labels I was drinking and learning about the lives of the winemakers who made the wine,” he says.
Unconsciously angling to write his own wine story, he struck up a friendship with several winemakers while he was living in Adelaide in 2012. He and his wife, Rainbo, also a marine biologist, spent their free time in the Basket Range wine region, easily slotting into a community known for making natural wine (a style of low-intervention grape-growing and winemaking that avoids synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and yeasts). In 2013, they made three barrels of their own wine.
Today, Belton, 41, farms five sites across the Adelaide Hills totalling eight hectares, planted with parcels of pinot noir, chardonnay, riesling and sauvignon blanc grapes that produce between 6000 and 7000 cases a year under his Gentle Folk label.
The Real Review has named Gareth Belton the Rising Star winemaker of 2025. “Belton is a quite recent arrival on the wine scene who has risen so quickly to become one of the most impressive winemakers in the Adelaide Hills,” judge Huon Hooke says.
While Hooke nominates Belton’s chardonnay and pinot noir as great wines, Belton says his ambition is to make the “best sauvignon blanc in Australia”. Unlike the popular Australian and New Zealand brands, such as Marlborough’s Oyster Bay and Cloudy Bay, Gentle Folk’s sauvignon blanc is wild-fermented and aged in barrels for up to eight months. This means it ferments naturally – no yeast is added to the wine to start fermentation – and the wine takes on some of the complex character of the oak, unlike standard sauvignon blanc, which is stored in steel tanks.
Belton throws a few other modern winemaking practices out the window, too, such as occasionally stomping on the fresh-picked grapes to press them. “If I feel like the wines will benefit from me getting my hands or feet in the juice, then I will. We pick by hand, we let wild ferments happen, we bottle by hand. We just make wine in the way we feel is right that particular year, always with maximum drinkability in mind.”
6. Yalumba
Yalumba, Eden Valley, SA.Credit: Adam Bruzzone
LOCATION: Eden Valley, SA
BEST KNOWN FOR: Yalumba, Australia’s oldest family-owned winery, produces a fine range of superb wines across many styles, brands and varieties, mostly red. They also make great rieslings under the Pewsey Vale and Heggies brands.
HUON SAYS: Yalumba’s main game is red wines, headed by super-impressive flagship The Caley cabernet shiraz, The Menzies Coonawarra cabernet, The Octavius Barossa shiraz and old‑vine Barossa grenaches. Viognier is a specialty, with spicy The Virgilius at the top and Eden Valley viognier second in line.
7. Seppeltsfield
Chief winemaker Fiona Donald at Seppeltsfield, Barossa Valley, SA.Credit: Max Allen
LOCATION: Barossa Valley, SA
BEST KNOWN FOR: Fortified wines and increasingly impressive dry red and white table wines produced at one of the Barossa’s showpiece wineries.
HUON SAYS: Fortified wines of great age, especially tawnies, headed by the unique 100-Year-Old Para Vintage Tawny, are legendary. But the dry reds are seriously impressive, too, especially shirazes labelled The Northing, The Southing, The Easting and The Westing, sourced from the four quadrants of the Barossa Valley.
8. Oakridge Wines
Oakridge Wines, Yarra Valley, Vic.Credit: Redfish Bluefish Photographic
LOCATION: Yarra Valley, Vic
BEST KNOWN FOR: Chardonnay, pinot noir and cabernet sauvignon under a series of individual vineyard labels. Chief winemaker David Bicknell’s skills extend to sparkling blanc de blancs, shiraz, riesling and sauvignon blanc.
HUON SAYS: The 864 “reserve” bottlings of single-vineyard chardonnay and pinot noir continue to delight: the pinot increasing in depth year by year, and the Winery Block vineyard cabernet sauvignon one of the region’s very best. An exciting new flagship chardonnay, The Apex Twin, debuted earlier this year.
9. Cullen Wines
Chief winemaker Vanya Cullen at Cullen Wines, Margaret River, WA.Credit: Cullen Wines
LOCATION: Margaret River, WA
BEST KNOWN FOR: A statuesque cabernet sauvignon-based red named Diana Madeline and a gorgeous chardonnay, Kevin John, named after winemaker Vanya Cullen’s parents, the winery’s founders.
HUON SAYS: Producing a wide range of outstanding wines is one thing, but the carbon-positive and biodynamically certified Cullen family business is also a beacon for environmental responsibility. Small volumes of rare and expensive Vanya cabernet sauvignon and Legacy Series chardonnays are the pinnacle of the range.
10. Wendouree
Tony Brady of Wendouree, Clare Valley, SA.
LOCATION: Clare Valley, SA
BEST KNOWN FOR: Magisterial red wines from shiraz, cabernet sauvignon, malbec and mataro, based on 19th-century vines and which are still unrivalled in the region.
HUON SAYS: There’s a waiting list for the mailing list, so keenly sought are the reclusive Tony and Lita Brady’s reds by wine lovers and collectors. In recent years, they seem to have entered a higher realm, more polished and balanced than ever. An additional wine, the single block 24B Shiraz, was released from the 2022 vintage.
SIX TOP WINES OF THE YEAR
The Real Review Wines of the Year 2025 have been awarded in six categories: Sparkling, White, Rosé, Red, Sweet and Fortified. The winners were selected by The Real Review’s team of tasters and writers: Huon Hooke, Aaron Brasher, Stuart Knox and Gabrielle Poy. They are not simply the highest-scoring wines of the past 12 months, although high ratings are necessary. We began by analysing the top-scoring wines, avoiding the very expensive and very rare ones, those produced in tiny quantities, and those available only to selected mailing lists or club members. All wines had to be reasonably available. These wines are truly the crème de la crème. We salute their makers.
11. Tyrrell’s
Tyrrell’s, Hunter Valley, NSW.Credit: Tyrrell’s
LOCATION: Hunter Valley, NSW
BEST KNOWN FOR: Vat 1 is the most famous Tyrrell’s semillon and Vat 9 is the most feted shiraz. Vat 47 is the top chardonnay, a truly iconic wine that can claim to be the longest-running, continuously produced chardonnay
in Australia.
HUON SAYS: Family-owned Tyrrell’s makes outstanding and true-to-region shiraz and semillon under a plethora of labels, many of them individual vineyard bottlings, and many sourced from the largest collection of century-old vineyards in the region. A fantastic 2022 Short Flat Old Vines Chardonnay – just a single barrel of it – added extra excitement to the latest releases.
12. Mount Pleasant
Mount Pleasant, Hunter Valley, NSW.Credit: Mount Pleasant
LOCATION: Hunter Valley, NSW
BEST KNOWN FOR: Great shiraz wines harvested from its vineyards in the red soil on the slopes of the Brokenback Range, some of the oldest vines in the Hunter.
HUON SAYS: Maurice O’Shea shiraz is the flagship wine, a powerful and ageworthy red, while the O.P & O.H and Rosehill shirazes have long been desirable cellaring wines. Occasional single-block shirazes are made from vines dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while excellent semillon, fiano and tempranillo are also produced.
13. Eisenstone
Eisenstone, Barossa Valley, SA.Credit: Eisenstone
LOCATION: Barossa Valley, SA
BEST KNOWN FOR: Shiraz, shiraz and more shiraz: single vineyard and single sub-region bottlings of Barossa shiraz of a level most others only dream about.
HUON SAYS: Stephen Cook has made a huge mark in just a few years of making his own wines. With a skew towards the northern end of the Barossa, he has succeeded in sourcing small parcels of outstanding grapes from top growers, which he turns into powerfully structured, concentrated wines of great character and ageing potential.
14. Mount Mary Vineyard
Mount Mary Vineyard, Yarra Valley, Vic.
LOCATION: Yarra Valley, Vic
BEST KNOWN FOR: Quintet, the greatest Mount Mary wine, a blend of all five Bordeaux red grapes. It is one of Australia’s most collectable and iconic wines.
HUON SAYS: Quintet is a masterpiece of elegance but the chardonnay, pinot noir and Triolet dry white blend are all outstanding. Every grape is grown on the Middleton family’s own vineyard, and the wine vinified, matured and bottled on the property. Today, these wines are more consistently brilliant than ever.
15. Bindi Wines
Bindi Wines, Macedon Ranges, Vic.Credit: Bindi Wines
LOCATION: Macedon Ranges, Vic
BEST KNOWN FOR: Pinot noir and chardonnay, which is all Bindi grows on its estate, Quartz being the top chardonnay. And the top pinot noir? It’s a toss-up between the six single-block bottlings, but probably the Block 5.
HUON SAYS: It would be difficult to find a more vineyard-focused winemaker than proprietor Michael Dhillon, a true vigneron whose patchwork of small vineyard plots is as similar to a Burgundy domaine as you will find anywhere outside France. Capturing the essence of each plot’s terroir in the bottle is an ambitious goal that he regularly achieves.
16. Henschke
Henschke, Eden Valley, SA.Credit: Charles Phillpot
LOCATION: Eden Valley, SA
BEST KNOWN FOR: Hill of Grace and Mount Edelstone, two single-vineyard shirazes, which are blue-chip collectable classics of more than 60 years’ standing.
HUON SAYS: This family company, in its sixth generation, issues a mesmerising range of high-quality red, white, sweet and sparkling wines, overseen by one of the wine world’s outstanding couples, winemaker Stephen Henschke and his viticulturist wife, Prue. The current-release 2021 single vineyard reds are at the top of their form. Cyril Henschke Cabernet Sauvignon delighted us.
17. Hentley Farm
Hentley Farm, Barossa Valley, SA.Credit: Hentley Farm
LOCATION: Barossa Valley, SA
BEST KNOWN FOR: Full-blooded western Barossa shirazes Clos Otto, The Beast and The Beauty, Von Kasper cabernet sauvignon and much more.
HUON SAYS: Shiraz is king at Hentley Farm, but The Old Legend grenache threatens to upset the order with its kaleidoscope of flavours, and that traditional favourite – a shiraz cabernet blend under the name of H-Block – could, in time, emerge as the best of the lot.
18. Brokenwood
Brokenwood, Hunter Valley, NSW.Credit: Brokenwood Wines
LOCATION: Hunter Valley, NSW
BEST KNOWN FOR: Hunter classics semillon and shiraz, with ILR Reserve semillon and Graveyard Vineyard shiraz at the apex. These are among the Hunter Valley’s – and Australia’s – greatest wines.
HUON SAYS: Brokenwood’s home is in the heart of the Hunter but there are no boundaries when it comes to sourcing other varieties from the best terroirs for those grapes. Hence, the range includes Margaret River cabernet (Wildwood Road), McLaren Vale shiraz (Rayner Vineyard and Wade Block 2), and Beechworth chardonnay and pinot noir (Indigo Vineyard) – all of them meticulously produced.
19. Grosset
Jeffrey Grosset at Grosset, Clare Valley, SA.Credit: Ben MacMahon
LOCATION: Clare Valley, SA
BEST KNOWN FOR: Arguably Australia’s most famous riesling, Polish Hill, a spine-tinglingly mineral wine from Clare’s high country, which ages long and beautifully.
HUON SAYS: Jeffrey Grosset’s cabernet blend – Gaia – is in top form, as are the two rieslings, Springvale and Polish Hill, while shiraz/nero d’avola blend Nereus bears the typical Grosset stamp of elegance. His Adelaide Hills chardonnay and pinot noir, as refined and perfumed as ever, have happily survived a change of vineyard source. Grosset is a champion of biodynamic viticulture.
20. Ten Minutes By Tractor
Ten Minutes by Tractor, Mornington Peninsula, Vic.Credit: Ten Minutes by Tractor
LOCATION: Mornington Peninsula, Vic
BEST KNOWN FOR: Single-vineyard chardonnays and pinot noirs from the high country of the Mornington Peninsula, bottled under the individual vineyard names, Judd, Wallis, McCutcheon and Mills.
HUON SAYS: Owner Martin Spedding is on a quest to improve his wines and to that end he is exploring the potential of close-planted vineyards. As a result, Ten Minutes By Tractor has released two new pinnacle wines: super-refined chardonnay and pinot noir under the name Trahere. Spedding’s Up The Hill and Down The Hill pinot noirs provide an illuminating style contrast.
TASTE THE TOP WINERIES: SPECIAL OFFER FOR GOOD WEEKEND READERS
The Real Review is holding a series of events to celebrate the Top Wineries of Australia 2025 featuring 40-plus top wineries and hosted by principal wine writer Huon Hooke.
- Sydney: Tasting and Masterclass at Kimpton Margot, Sydney (August 2). Dinner at RAFI, North Sydney, with conversation between Huon Hooke and Good Weekend’s Katrina Strickland (August 5).
- Melbourne: Tasting and Masterclass at Glasshouse, Olympic Park Oval (August 9). Dinner at Tonka, Melbourne, with conversation between Huon Hooke and Good Weekend senior writer Konrad Marshall (August 11).
Good Weekend readers will receive $20 off event tickets and a chance to win a LeCavist wine cabinet and 97 wines from participating Top Wineries, valued at $7000. Purchase tickets here.
For The Real Review’s full Top Wineries of Australia 2025 list, featuring 400+ wineries, read more here.
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.