Grossett
Polish Hill
Clare Valley
2024

The producer

In the cool, elevated Clare Valley of South Australia, Jeff Grosset quietly began what would become one of Australia’s most revered wine stories. Trained in oenology and driven by a fierce commitment to purity and precision, Grosset established his winery in 1981 with a clear focus: to craft exceptional wines that reflect the unique character of the region’s soils and climate.

From the outset, Grosset stood apart for his uncompromising approach to quality. Meticulous vineyard management, organic farming (well before it became fashionable), and an insistence on bottling only estate-grown fruit set the tone. While many producers sought scale, Grosset pursued clarity – in flavour, philosophy, and structure.

The name Grosset became synonymous with world-class Riesling, particularly from the now iconic Polish Hill and Springvale vineyards. These sites, with their distinctive soils – slate for Polish Hill and red loam over limestone for Springvale – produce wines of strikingly different character, yet both possess the trademark Grosset precision: pure, intense, and built to age.

Over time, the range grew to include Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from the cooler Adelaide Hills, as well as a finely poised Gaia – a Cabernet blend from the estate's biodynamic vineyard, named in honour of the Earth. But it is perhaps Grosset’s vision for Riesling, including the role he played in founding the Clare Valley’s Riesling classification system, that defines his legacy.

Quietly influential, fiercely consistent, and always driven by a belief in terroir and truth in winemaking, Grosset remains a benchmark not only for Clare Valley, but for Australian fine wine as a whole.

The wine

Grosset Polish Hill Riesling is the flagship of Jeff Grosset’s revered Clare Valley range, and a benchmark for Australian Riesling. Sourced exclusively from a single eight-hectare vineyard planted on a harsh, slate-rich hillside, the site’s low fertility and shallow soils naturally limit yields, concentrating flavour and structure. Certified organic and biodynamic, the vineyard is meticulously managed with a focus on soil health and vine balance. Hand-harvested and whole-bunch pressed, the juice undergoes a slow, cool fermentation with only the purest free-run juice making it to bottle. No fining is used, and sulphur is kept to a minimum. The result is a wine of extraordinary purity, tension, and longevity — tightly coiled in youth with lime, wet stone and talc notes, but capable of evolving beautifully for decades.

We choose our wines based on a range of criteria (see how we choose our wines) of which critic scores is just one. Rather than simply highlight the best score to promote a wine, our average critic score is calculated from the scores provided by several respected wine critics, who we follow for specific regions. They do not represent all critic scores and, wherever possible, we try and give more weight to more recent reviews. Where appropriate we consider market-based scores like Global Wine Score or Wine Searcher Average scores.

As a rule, we look to offer wines that achieve a 92/100 average critic score or better and frankly a lot of very good wines simply don’t make the cut. As a high-end provider we want to reflect that positioning in the quality of wines we offer. Such wines are only a tiny fraction of those generally on offer in the market. We believe that an average score is a more conservative and representative approach, but it is still subjective and only offered as a guide to our customers, who will (and should) do their own research. We will add individual critic scores to our website in the future.