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.

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Alkina is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery.

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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 article was written by Campbell Mattinson, founder of The Winefront and mattinson, and former chief editor of Halliday.

When you pick up a wine book and see thousands of top-scoring wines, it’s hard to know which wine to choose. Mattinson guides you through this maze, giving you an honest view of the best Australian wines, the best wine stories, the best wine producers, the best value wines and simply, the best tasting wines. Importantly, Mattinson will tell you about the top-rated wines and also about the underrated wines. In short, Mattinson knows Australian wines inside and out.

Mattinson has been a photo-journalist since 1987. For the past 25 years he’s been a voice that you can trust when you’re looking for the best wines. 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, and is the author of the award-winning book The Wine Hunter. He’s not afraid to put a score beside a wine. But what he’d rather do, is tell you the wine’s story.

https://www.campbellmattinson.com
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