2021 Torbreck Les Amis Grenache, Barossa Valley

The 2021 season in Barossa was ideal. It marked the end of hot and dry conditions, the yields were healthy (thanks in no small part to the healthy 2020 rains in the season leading in to the 2021 growing season), and the conditions during the 2021 growing season were mild and dry. So here, the 2021 Les Amis Grenache is exuberant, with abundant sweet red fruit, and the oak almost emphasizes the sweetness in the red fruit, with scraped vanilla pod, sweet licorice, cracked fennel and tar. This is a superb wine that, if anything, will be better in a few years from now, despite being delicious today. Drink to 2046.

95 points Erin Larkin for The Wine Advocate, September 2026

Heady aromas of plum conserve, mulberry, licorice, blackberry, fragrant oak, Asian spice and dried flowers. Fleshy, opulent, brooding and decadently flavoured. The flavours are full bore, all dark fruits, sweet oak, spice and a brambly, woodsy earthiness. The tannins and acidity bring plenty of shape and cut to the finish and do a pretty good job of controlling the mightily powerful fruit. Drink to 2034.

95 points Aaron Brasher for The Real Review, August 2024

Grenache sourced from the gnarled old vines of the Slade vineyard in Greenock; matured 24 months French barrique (40% new). Pure dark plum fruits studded with clove and exotic spice along with hints of cola, pomegranate, star anise, tamarind, ginger cake, dried citrus rind with a touch of amaro and blood orange. It's a deeper, darker more powerful style and displays the perfectly poised fruit of a great vintage. Plenty of clovey depth with this release, with some superfine tannin and sarsaparilla wildness coming through at the end. Drink to 2038.

95 points Dave Brookes for Halliday Wine Companion, June 2024

Wonderfully perfumed aromas of wild blackberries, tobacco leaves, ferric earth and menthol. The palate is full-bodied with fine tannins and bright acidity, giving notes of blackcurrants, mocha and dried herbs. Powerful with an underlying freshness. Made from a dry-grown vineyard planted in the 1960s. Only 225 cases made. Drink or hold.

94 points James Suckling, October 2024

The fruit for the Les Amis comes from the Slade Vineyard, a sandy, dry grown Greenock site with an easterly aspect that was first planted in 1901. The name translates as The Friends and is a nod to the growers and relationships that make these rare, small batches of wine possible. 

The 2021 season was defined by a continuously warm to hot summer with no effective rainfall, wind and hail at flowering, and followed with three major frosts - resulting in an earlier and much smaller harvest than average. These tough conditions produced smaller clusters of intensely dark berries with thick fleshy skins contrasted against brown mature stalks.