Grosset
Grosset is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery — Campbell Mattinson's highest honour.
Clare Valley.
Grosset is, first and last, a riesling producer. On the Australian riesling landscape there is no producer with a higher reputation. But to leave it there would be to sell the winery short. Grosset’s Gaia cabernet blend and its Adelaide Hills chardonnay are outstanding wines, routinely, and its more recent turns to fiano and to shiraz (blended with nero d'avola) have arrived without the quality bar so much as quivering. Jeffrey Grosset is a meticulous, rigorous winemaker whose wines, every year, stand as beacons of quality.
The case.
Jeffrey Grosset trained at Roseworthy, made wine at Seppelt and in Germany, and was a head winemaker by his mid-twenties before going out by himself, in 1981, using an old butter-and-ice factory in Auburn at the southern end of the Clare Valley. He made a clutch of rieslings and a lone cabernet that first vintage, and in a decision that set the course for everything since, he bottled the riesling sites separately rather than as one single blend. Single-site expression was not yet the orthodoxy it has become; Grosset planted a stake. The Polish Hill riesling – grown on a hard, unloved strip of 500-million-year-old blue slate that he studied geologically before he planted it – is the purest statement of that idea, and remains the only riesling to hold Langton's top "Exceptional" grade.
Grosset is all about the wines, in the glass. But his influence on the industry at large cannot be ignored. This one small Clare Valley producer has reshaped the Australian industry from the inside, twice. In the 1980s Grosset led the fight for riesling's varietal integrity – to stop the word being used on cask whites made from anything but riesling – and won. Then, in 2000, he was the driving force behind the Clare Valley's collective switch to screwcap, and campaigned well past his own region to bring the rest of Australia, its retailers, its writers and its drinkers along. It is one thing to make some of the country's finest wine year after year. It is another to alter how the country makes, labels, seals and ages wine full stop.
Grosset is riesling royalty, certainly. But Grosset has never been about one variety only. The Gaia cabernet blend comes off a vineyard he planted in 1986 at the highest, coolest point in the Clare Valley – a deliberately contrary move in a decade that prized ripeness and weight – and has made an elegant, cellarworthy wine ever since. Add the Adelaide Hills chardonnay and pinot noir, the fiano, the shiraz-nero blend – all of it grown on certified organic and biodynamic estate vineyards – and you have a wine producer marked near-enough as perfect.
The wines that prove the case.
There are 67 reviews of individual Grosset riesling reviews on The Winefront site.
There are 26 reviews of Grosset Gaia on The Winefront site, 1998–2024.
There are 21 reviews of Grosset Chardonnay on The Winefront site, 2002–2025.
Grosset Polish Hill Riesling 2024 (Clare Valley): Winefront.
Grosset Polish Hill Riesling 2002 (Clare Valley): Winefront.
Grosset Gaia 2021 (Clare Valley): Winefront.
Grosset Gaia 2013 (Clare Valley): Winefront.
Grosset 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.
