Yangarra Estate

27 Nov

Yangarra Estate is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery — Campbell Mattinson's highest honour.
No McLaren Vale winery has done more to reshape Australian grenache over the past 15 years.

Yangarra Estate may or may not be Australia’s best performing winery of the past decade, but certainly no Australian winery has performed better. It has helped revolutionise McLaren Vale grenache, it has taken Rhone whites to new levels, it’s put both single-block shiraz and single-block grenache on a pedestal and it’s been a leader of quality, drink-now, preservative free wines. Yangarra makes good wine at good prices and it also makes the best of the best; sometimes it even combines the two. The narrative of Australian grenache, in particular, has been turned on its head – for the better – over the past 15 or so years and no winery has been more instrumental in this shifting of the dial than McLaren Vale’s Yangarra Estate.

The 2021 and 2023 releases of Yangarra Old Vine Grenache are a great place to start. Winefront reviews here.

Web: Yangarra Estate.

Yangarra Estate is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery.

Campbell Mattinson is the former Chief Editor of Halliday, and is the founder of The Winefront. He’s authored six books, has won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year award twice, and has been a journalist since 1987. He is also a commercial photographer.

australia's best wineriesMcLaren vale's best wineriesbest australian grenacheMattinson Ten Star 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

Yangarra Estate

Brokenwood

Cullen