2024 Grosset Apiana Fiano, Clare Valley

After a day of tasting a lot (a LOT) of full-bodied reds, this is a most welcome glass. In truth, the Grosset delivery arrived halfway through the day, and so I positioned these four 2024 whites from Grosset at the end of the tasting as a special treat for myself. I'm glad to have arrived in one piece. So, this 2024 Apiana Fiano leads with nashi pear and green apple, white pepper, pressed flowers and chalky talc. It even has that lovely Riesling talc-y thing going on here, and it is very pretty for it. On the palate, the wine is thick with flavor, viscose and yet totally composed and balanced. This is a lovely, welcome, wine here, highly recommended. This is my favorite Fiano in Australia. Drink 2024 to 2029.

94 points Erin Larkin for The Wine Advocate, September 2024

The most prestigious fiano in the country! Sound the alarms! Good energy here, a crunch of nashi pear, light almond notes, quirky but appealing kombu seaweed characters and saline minerality. It slips along the palate with a little waxiness and finishes with a brittle, pleasingly fresh trill of lemon-gingery flavours and a lick more brine. Gently savoury, though quite shy and delicate at the same time. Pretty wine. Drink 2024 to 2030.

93 points Mike Bennie for Halliday Wine Companion, August 2024

Quite generous on the nose, with aromas of lemon pith, fennel, curt grass and mandarins. The plate is medium-bodied with a generous mouthfeel and focused acidity, giving notes of orange blossoms, lime curd, macadamia nuts and flint. Textural with a slight phenolic grip. Very good. Drink or hold. 

94 points James Suckling, October 2024

Jeffrey Grosset established his winery in Auburn in 1981 with a single guiding conviction: that exceptional wine begins with finding precisely the right place. Grosset remains one of Australia's most focused and uncompromising small producers with four Clare Valley vineyards certified organic and biodynamic. These are farmed with a philosophy that has deepened considerably since Jeffrey first engaged with biodynamics as a way of understanding his land rather than simply managing it.

Fiano is one of Italy's ancient white varieties, known to the Romans as Apiana for its ability to attract bees. Grosset has chosen Campanian clones for the poor, rocky soils of Rockwood Vineyard in the high-altitude Watervale subregion. Here the heat loving variety is pushed to its limits, with naturally low yields but fruit of remarkable concentration. Grown biodynamically, hand harvested and bottled unfined.

The 2024 vintage brought a cool season whose energy and freshness show clearly in the wine. Nashi pear, green apple, pressed flowers and chalky talc on the nose, with a saline minerality and the faintest suggestion of kombu threading through. The palate is viscous and textured yet entirely composed — lemon, pear and a gentle beeswax richness through the mid-palate, finishing dry, bright and long. A wine of quiet intensity that opens with patience in the glass.

The wine comes to its own with the food of Campania. Try pairing it with white fish baked with olives, capers and lemon; the wine's saline texture and citrus freshness are a natural foil for anything clean and gently briny.

Drink now through 2029. This wine is vegan friendly.