Alkina Estate Fractures Grenache 2025

Written By Campbell Mattinson
Bottle of Alkina Estate Fractures Grenache 2025.

Alkina Estate Fractures Grenache 2025
$100, 14% alcohol, DIAM cork, Barossa Valley.

Alkina’s new Fractures Grenache is based or grown on the Polygon No. 2 plot of grenache vines growing in Alkina’s Barossa Valley vineyard. These vines grow in hard, bony, schist-packed soils. This vineyard is certified as both organic and as biodynamic. I tasted this wine and placed it straight in to the Best Australian Grenache collection. This wine is fermented in concrete (with 80% whole bunches) and also matured in concrete.

Holy cow. I mean, this is wow territory from the first sip. It’s tight, perfumed, spicy, earthen, aflame with rose petal characters, raspberries, minerals, roasted spice and sweet tea. It’s wine, great wine, served as it should be; pure, exotic, controlled and uncontrollable at once. On the one hand it doesn’t take prisoners; on the other hand it’s delicate. There was a time when I might have said that McLaren Vale had stolen the part of my heart where the grenache variety resides; this wine steals it back.

96 points.

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Alkina is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery.
There are 50 Alkina wines reviewed on The Winefront site.

 
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
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