Tyrrell’s
Tyrrell’s is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery — Campbell Mattinson's highest honour.
Hunter Valley.
The Tyrrell's winery is the green light at the end of the Australian wine pier. It sits as a beacon on its Hunter Valley hill, its old-school ways and values more modern and relevant than ever. This is a family that has made wine on the same Pokolbin dirt since 1858, through five generations, and yet nothing about it, in the glass, ever feels less like a museum. Tyrrell’s produces terrific wine after terrific wine – most especially with chardonnay, semillon and shiraz, but really with whatever it turns its hand to. Tyrrell's is a pillar of strength for its region; it is the master of wine as a portrait of a place, painted in wine, sealed in a bottle.
The case.
Edward Tyrrell, a young Englishman from Kent, took up a land grant at Pokolbin in 1858 and built a hand-hewn ironbark slab hut that still stands on the property today. Everything Tyrrell's is flows from this simple act. The Hunter Valley never got phylloxera, so the vines here are old in a way almost nowhere else in the world can match. The Old Patch shiraz was planted in 1867 and remains among the oldest producing vines in New South Wales; its HVD chardonnay vineyard dates (unbelievably) to 1908, and may be the oldest chardonnay vines on earth.
For all this old-school framing, no Australian family has done more to shape what Australia actually drinks. In 1971 Tyrrell's released Vat 47, the first commercial chardonnay made in Australia – Murray Tyrrell reputedly acquiring his cuttings by climbing a neighbour's fence. Vat 47 remains a benchmark more than half a century on. Tyrrell’s Vat 1 semillon, first made in 1963, helped (or did) define the world's understanding of dry semillon, and is the most awarded white wine in Australian history, its tally counted in the thousands of medals (indeed nearly 5500), and hundreds of trophies.
What holds Tyrrell’s together, across varieties and across decades, is an unerring dedication to site, and to what each vineyard wants to say. Semillon is picked early, unoaked, fermented in steel and released with age; chardonnay and shiraz are built to speak of where they grew rather than of what was done to them.
The wines that prove the case.
There have been 450 Tyrrell’s wines reviewed on The Winefront. Gary Walsh is an expert on the wines of Tyrrell’s and covers all the major releases, every year, on The Winefront site. No one in the world covers the wines of Tyrrell’s better or with more depth than Gary Walsh.
There have been 27 vintages of Tyrrell’s Vat 47 Chardonnay reviewed on The Winefront.
There have been 25 vintages of Tyrrell’s 4 Acres Shiraz reviewed on The Winefront.
There have been 20 vintages of Tyrrell’s Vat 9 Shiraz reviewed on The Winefront, plus notes from a vertical tasting of Tyrrell’s Vat 9 Shiraz 1972–2019.
Tyrrell’s 4 Acres Shiraz 2014 (Hunter Valley): Winefront.
Tyrrell’s Old Patch Shiraz 2018 (Hunter Valley): Winefront.
Tyrrell’s 8 Acres Shiraz 2025 (Hunter Valley): Winefront.
Tyrrell's 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.
