Alkina Estate Grenache 2024

Written By Campbell Mattinson
Bottle of Alkina Estate Grenache 2024.

Alkina Estate Grenache 2024
$55, 13.5% alcohol, DIAM cork, Barossa Valley.

You would have heard all the raves about Alkina over the past few years but, like me, maybe, baulked at the pricing. Here we get an insight to the Alkina magic at a more palatable level. These wines had me rushing to the keyboard. Personally, I’m in.

This is grown organically, using biodynamic principles. 200-ish dozen were made. It was fermented and matured in concrete only.

You don’t rock up to these modern grenache wines with an empty mind, or with an empty heart. You rock up full of hope. Most times, the hope quickly dissipates. But here the hope turned straight into joy, and from there we’re away, full like a balloon. Crushed rocks, berried fruits, cooling herbs, twigs, macerated flowers. This is an autumn solstice of a wine, summer and winter placed at a tension point. It’s textural. It has the presence of mind to run grip through its gears. It’s a motivated self-starter of a wine, start to finish; sans artifice. You could use the word verity and be bang on. It’s 55 bucks, on the nose, for the win.

94 points.

—

Alkina is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery.

—

Alkina Estate Semillon 2024 and Alkina Estate Shiraz 2024 are ultra impressive too. See The Winefront (subscriber only) site for reviews and scores.

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
Previous

Wines of Merritt Rosé 2024
Next

Bien Nacido Estate Collection Chardonnay 2022