2025 Grosset Alea Riesling, Clare Valley

There is such pleasure here, a glossiness to texture, a joyous feel to fruit character, a light dusting of spice, some sweet, herbal inflections and a soft landing of pulpy mandarin to finish. It feels even-keeled and refreshing while also offering nuance from the variety, a detail of citrus fruits, spice elements, slate-like minerality and a judicious flamboyance of fruitiness. Puts a smile on your dial. Drink 2025 to 2035.

94 points Mike Bennie for Halliday Wine Companion, September 2025

This 2025 Alea Riesling is ultra pretty, with notes of lychee and green apple, rose petals, pear and lime juice. The wine is detailed in the mouth and shows great promise for the future. This is a wine that ages gracefully and subtly, and the way it sits in the mouth is a thing of great beauty—it is poised and balanced and fresh. The residual sugar barely registers, save for the sleekness of texture and the way it lingers through the finish. Drink 2025 to 2045.

94 points Erin Larkin for The Wine Advocate, September 2025

Pale, almost water-like in the glass; very restrained and reserved on the nose also, with fresh pastry, lemon blossom aromas, the palate likewise shy and unready, with the merest trace of sweetness which carries a trace of honey, and leaves the palate cleansed and refreshed. This is a very youthful wine which needs time and will richly reward a little cellaring. I'd keep it for at least two years and then drink for 12+. It's almost a sin to open it too soon. Drink 2026 to 2040

94 points Huon Hooke for The Real Review, July 2025

Mineral-edged aromas of lime zest, grapefruit peel and wet stones. The palate is light- to medium-bodied with tight acidity and a touch of texture from residual sugar, giving flavors of lemon balm, white orchard fruit and crushed stones. Great tension and balance. Drink or hold.

94 points James Suckling, October 2024

It’s hard to get people excited over ‘balance’ but sometimes it’s a beautiful thing. This is a riesling of body, shape, juiciness and length, but as a determinant of quality it’s the balance that does it. It builds such a weight of flavour through the mid-palate that you wonder if it’s going to get stuck there – and then it just sails on as if everything has been taken in its stride. Is there some residual here? You’d barely know it. This is real craft, real understanding. This is an excellent riesling.

94 points Campbell Mattinson for The Wine Front

Grosset was established by Jeffrey Grosset 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.

The Alea is a Riesling now in its sixteenth vintage. With fruit sourced from Grosset’s biodynamically farmed Rockwood Vineyard, it showcases the vineyard’s distinctive hard red rock and poor orange-red loam soils and the benefits of allowing natural residual sugar levels to reflect both the fruit and the vintage. Vinification is straightforward with the wine guided from vineyard into the bottles with minimal intervention.

The 2025 vintage in Clare Valley was warm and remarkably dry and required care as to canopy maintenance especially in dry grown vineyards. It will be remembered as a vintage of quality over quantity.

The 2025 is barely off-dry, with 9g/L natural residual sugar, an amount that brings natural balance to the wine. The fresh, lively fruit and floral aromas are lightly spiced, and flow to a focused, detailed and textured medium-weight palate with a long, restrained finish.

A delicious wine now but can be cellared with confidence over several years. Good company to a roasted fennel and Gorgonzola Dolce tart, Thai-style Kingfish ceviche with lemongrass, chilli, and coconut cream or crispy-skin pork belly with apple-ginger purée.