2025 Jasper Hill Georgia's Paddock Shiraz, Heathcote

Year after year this wine delivers, and the 2025 is no exception. There’s lovely depth and concentration cut with freshness and purity, giving classic Heathcote shiraz notes of blackberry, mulberry, dried herbs, red brick, bitter chocolate and a spicy earthy undertone. The palate is firmly framed yet layered with silky tannins and class, leading to a long, decadent yet restrained finish. Excellent now but will reward with cellaring. Drink or hold.

99 points Ryan Montgomery for James Suckling, September 2026

Jasper Hill is a Heathcote winery established by Ron and Elva Laughton in 1975. It remains a family operation, with the baton now passed onto their daughter Emily and her husband Nick.

From the beginning, the philosophy has been fiercely minimalist, combining dry, organic farming with traditional winemaking in open-top fermenters. Their two vineyard sites are located just one kilometre apart, with Emily's Paddock facing east and Georgia's Paddock mostly west. Both sites are on Heathcote's famous Cambrian-era broken down basalt soils at an elevation of roughly 300 metres.

Georgia’s Paddock Shiraz is Jasper Hill's most important wine and one of Australia’s most collected Shiraz wines, celebrated for its complex yet unadulterated expression of Heathcote. The hand-picked garpes are de-stemmed and sorted by individual berries before fermentes are allowed to start with indigenous yeasts, with the musts gently pumped and plunged between four and six weeks. The wine is then pressed and racked into a combination of French and Austrian for a twelve month rest, and cross flow filtered prior to bottling. Minimal sulphur is judiously used throughout the winemaking process.

While approachable in its youth for its vibrant fruit, it truly shines with cellaring, evolving complex savoury and spice-driven layers over a long period of time.