Grosset Wines

History

Jeffrey Grosset established Grosset Wines in 1981 in the Clare Valley, South Australia, working initially out of a small stone building in Auburn. He had trained at Roseworthy Agricultural College and worked briefly in other cellars before striking out on his own. From the outset, the focus was narrow and deliberate: Clare Valley Riesling made with a precision unusual for Australian wine at the time. The winery has remained under Grosset's ownership and direction ever since, with no corporate change of hands. That continuity is rare for a producer of this profile.

Grosset was among the group of Clare Valley producers who championed the switch to screwcap closures in 2000, a move that proved influential far beyond the valley and did much to normalize screwcap use for fine wine across Australia and New Zealand. The producer remains small by any measure, with output kept intentionally limited.

Vineyards

The two flagship Riesling sites are Polish Hill and Springvale, each producing wines of markedly different character. Polish Hill sits on ancient, hard, fractured Silurian shale and slate soils with very low fertility; the vineyard is high in the valley and produces wines of considerable structural tension and tight minerality that typically need years to open. Springvale, sourced from an older vineyard on the western slopes of the valley floor, grows in richer, more yielding soils and delivers a rounder, more immediately aromatic style. Both sites benefit from the Clare Valley's continental diurnal range, with warm days and cold nights preserving acidity and slowing phenolic development.

Grosset also produces Gaia, a Bordeaux-variety red blend sourced from estate and contracted fruit grown in the Clare Valley. The winery has long worked with growers in addition to its own holdings. Specific certified organic or biodynamic status is not documented here, though the producer has been associated with careful, low-intervention viticulture.

Winemaking

The Rieslings are fermented cold and slowly in stainless steel, with no oak contact. Grosset aims for wines that are dry or close to it, with residual sugar held low enough that the impression is always of austerity rather than fruit sweetness. Filtration is minimal. The wines are bottled under screwcap and released with some time in bottle, though Polish Hill in particular benefits from five or more years of cellaring and holds well for considerably longer, as the reviewed back-vintages demonstrate.

Gaia is barrel-aged in French oak, with the proportion of new wood varying by vintage. It draws on Cabernet Sauvignon as its spine, with Cabernet Franc and Merlot typically in support, and reflects a cooler-climate Bordeaux sensibility rather than the extracted style once common in Australian reds. It is the outlier in a range otherwise built almost entirely around white wine.