Rieslingfreak
Rieslingfreak is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery.
Only the best of Australia’s best wineries are ranked as a Mattinson 10-Star Winery.
Riesling, from the Eden and Clare valleys, made with meticulous care, thought, dedication and more. Rieslingfreak never produces anything other than beautiful wine – in various styles, but all with the riesling grape as its champion, its guide and its voice. This is a winery given over, wholly and unfashionably, to a single grape. I would go so far as to say that modern Australian wine would be lesser without this single producer. Rieslingfreak is a benchmark producer of a benchmark grape variety.
The case
Rieslingfreak did not spring from nowhere. Rieslingfreak is the name of the brand, now, but it’s long been the nickname of its creator, John Hughes. Hughes grew up on a riesling property in the Clare Valley, at Penwortham; the vineyard’s grapes went to Skillogalee. His family moved to White Hutt, north of Clare, in 1998 – and it’s here that things went up a notch. The family property at White Hutt had five distinct riesling sites, each on its own soil. This is where the modern legend that is Rieslingfreak began to take form.
Hughes, once he got going – the Rieslingfreak brand started in 2009 – set about something almost nobody else in the country attempts: he only makes riesling, and he makes many different rieslings every year. He is a brand-manager’s nightmare; which is exactly the point, and exactly how he likes it. Hughes takes what is done “normally” and examines it, honours it, amplifies it.
The rieslings he makes, each year, range from bone-dry through off-dry to lusciously sweet, and can even be experienced in still, sparkling and fortified form. Each wine is numbered in the German tradition, the number a code for where the fruit grew and how dry or sweet the wine is. Hughes’ way, as always, is both highly traditional and highly idiosyncratic at once.
What lifts Rieslingfreak beyond mere devotion is, most of all, the wine in the glass. This is the fundamental truth: the wines are both beautiful and compelling. But part of the secret, too, is the method. Hughes is as exacting as he is contrarian. As everyone and anyone preaches “minimal intervention”, Hughes goes the other way. He machine-harvests at night, uses cultured yeast and a measured hand of sulphur, chills his juice hard, fines and filters, uses (foudre) French oak when he pleases. The wines he produces are not clinical but luminous. John Hughes is not just a maker of riesling. He lives it, inside and out. He grew up with it.
The wines that carry the case.
Rieslingfreak No.2 Polish Hill River Riesling 2024 (Clare Valley): Winefront.
Rieslingfreak No.3 Riesling 2024 (Clare Valley): Winefront.
Rieslingfreak No.12 Riesling 2023 (Eden Valley): Winefront.
Rieslingfreak No.2 Clare Valley Riesling 2014 (Clare Valley): Winefront.
Rieslingfreak 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.
