2025 Mount Horrocks Watervale Riesling, Clare Valley

This is a stunning riesling. All the intensity and juiciness of the vintage with a chisel cut of chalkiness in texture. Straight-up lime dashed with saline minerality, a crunch of green apple, some feijoa tropical notes and a clean, briny finish with licks of pink grapefruit. It hits the mark for refreshment factor and drives home the vibrancy message in tandem. Such high drinkability and complexity here. Drink to 2040.

96 points & Special Value Mike Bennie for Halliday Wine Companion, November 2025

The 2025 Watervale Riesling is fine, fleshy and finessed, with talcy phenolics and rose petal notes woven into the palate. On the nose, the wine shows all the delicacy that we have come to expect from Stephanie Toole's work at Mount Horrocks, while the palate really drives this home through the finish. It is perhaps a little uneven in terms of expression in the mouth—at one moment it is true to the nose, while at another, it feels watery and lean. The finish is strong, and the wine leaves a favorable impression on the palate. This is very good and with the viticulture to emphasize this fact. Drink to 2039.

94 points Erin Larkin for The Wine Advocate, December 2025

Pale colour; fresh aromas of citrus blossoms, especially lemon, a hint of baker's yeast, and some passionfruit emerged with time in the glass, while the palate is delicate and refined, with tension and subtlety, soft yet dry at the finale with a well-judged touch of phenolics adding to the firmness and dryness of the aftertaste, which is very refreshing, long and more-ish. A baby, which will develop well and build complexity. Drink to 2037.

93 points Huon Hooke for The Real Review, October 2025

Mount Horrocks is a Clare Valley producer of fine wines established in 1993 by its winemaker and owner Stephanie Toole.

Her nine hectares of vines are farmed with certified organic and biodynamic practices, with each wine a single vineyard wine from one of her three sites: the dry Riesling, Semillon, Nero d’Avola and Cabernet Sauvignon from her largest one in central Watervale, Shiraz from the Alexander vineyard at 475 metres elevation in the extreme north-eastern corner of Watervale and finally her sweet, Cordon Cut Riesling from Auburn, a warmer site at lower elevations.

Stephanie’s hands-on approach extends into every aspect of the business, and what really defines her work is her extraordinarily detailed attention to viticulture. Hers really are wines made in the vineyard with low-intervention work at the winery.

The hand picked fruit for this wine was cooled, destemmed and crushed with only the free run juice used for the fermets in stainless steel. The wine was not fined, and was bottle early for a classical expression of Clare Valley Riesling.

Driven by mineral purity and a fine slate-like texture that some might call it steely, the wine offers deep and energetic fruit, and the long flavours that emerge with time in the glass. While highly enjoyable now, this will get much better with a few years in the bottle and would easily cellar for a decade. Your food options really depend on that timeline, as a young and mature Riesling are completely different in nature.