Adelina

Written By Campbell Mattinson

Adelina is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery — Campbell Mattinson's highest honour.
Clare Valley.

Riesling, shiraz, grenache, mataro, malbec. Old vines, the best address, newer vines, organic certification. Adelina is a modern master of Clare Valley wine growing and making. This is wine art of the most meticulous kind.

The case.

The modern face of Australian wine is, at heart, at its best, traditional. It’s the brave new face of history. Few Australian wine producers capture this best face better than the Adelina winery, located on Wendouree Road in the sub-region of Springfarm, in the Clare Valley. Every one of Adelina’s wines – typically wines of both body and finish – is carefully grown, designed and made. The bedrock of Adelina is its shiraz vines, planted in 1915, its grenache vines, planted in 1940, and its Pedro Ximenez, also planted in 1915, upon which are layered newer plantings of malbec, mataro and more shiraz. All these vineyards are farmed organic. Every time I drink a wine of Adelina I get two sips in and suddenly have the urge to get in my car and drive to the Clare Valley and head to the place on Wendouree Road where its owners Jen and Col McBryde toil and grow and inspire. The wines have that evocation. They rouse.

The wines that prove the case.

Adelina Estate Shiraz 2022 (Clare Valley): Winefront.
Adelina Polish Hill River Riesling 2025 (Clare Valley): Yes there’s excellent intensity of flavour here and yes it penetrates long through the finish. But it’s the dry, slatey aspect of the finish, in context, that really beguiles.
Adelina Estate Grenache 2025(Clare Valley): It would be fair to say that this wine encompasses everything that is great about modern high quality Australian Grenache.
Adelina Estate Shiraz 2019 (Clare Valley): There are twiggy, almost herbal notes hovering here but fruit and the most gorgeous sheets of tannin are the main show. This is beautiful. Really beautiful. I’m not just urging you; I’m urging myself towards the order form. (Winefront).

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See also [There are 99 Adelina wines reviewed on The Winefront site]
See also [Best Australian Grenache]

Adelina is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery – the highest honour awarded by Australian wine critic Campbell Mattinson. 10-Star status recognises one thing: the quality of the wine in the glass, every glass, across the range. The full list of 10-Star Wineries constitutes Australia's Best Wineries.

Campbell Mattinson

This post was written by Campbell Mattinson. Mattinson is a former chief editor of the Halliday Wine Companion book, former editor of Halliday magazine, former editor of Australian Sommelier Magazine and founder of The Winefront business. He is the author of five books on wine – four of which were bestsellers (The Wine Hunter, the Big Red Wine Book 2008, the Big Red Wine Book 2009, and the Big Red Wine Book 2010).

Mattinson is also the founder of the Mattinson Photography business.

Campbell Mattinson has been an independent journalist, wine critic and photographer for forty years. He’s the only Australian to have won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year Award more than once. He’s a past winner of a Louis Roederer International Wine Media Award; is the author of the award-winning book The Wine Hunter; and is the author of the best-selling novel We Were Not Men. He’s also a winner of a St Kilda Film Festival Award (as writer-director) and is a former winner of the national Best Australian Sports Writing Award. In 2026 three of his photographs were short-listed for the World Food Photography Awards.

Campbell Mattinson, who is 100% independent, has tasted between 5000 and 10,000 wines each and every year for the past 25 years. He tastes blind, in comparative brackets, as often as is practicable.

Campbell Mattinson is a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker and a wine critic. In all of these mediums his prime motive is to tell people's stories.

https://www.campbellmattinson.com
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