This $16 Barossa red just gatecrashed Australia’s most prestigious wine show

Cat Amongst The Pigeons Grenache Shiraz Mataro 2023
$16, 14.5% alcohol, screwcap, Barossa Valley.

Cat Amongst the Pigeons by name, cat amongst the pigeons by nature. This red from the Barossa Valley has just won a trophy at the 2025 National Wine Show in Canberra – the most prestigious wine show in Australia. The trophy that it won was the Grenache Blends Trophy. Winning this award is always a grand achievement but to win it with a wine that sells for $16? That’s amazing. As in, amazing amazing.

So amazing that – even though I have hundreds of wine media samples to taste – it made me go out and buy a bottle pronto.

Now often – I’d be the first to admit – I end up being disappointed when I actually taste the wine of a result like this (not that results like this are common). But in this case, I’m not. This is a good wine. This is a very good wine. In fact it’s one of the red wine steals of the year.

It’s raspberried, it’s splashed with saltbush notes, it has both finesse and sinew. It’s balanced on a pinhead, in a good way. It feels clean, neat and polished with nary a stray hair in sight, but the trick with this wine is that it doesn’t taste too or overly commercial, even though it is. It just tastes good. Indeed if this wine was $35 I wouldn’t blink an eye; which is another way of saying, you’re paying about half price on the actual quality on offer.

Make hay. Buy.

93/100.