I published a story on Sierra Reed in Halliday Wine Companion Magazine last year. A box of her latest wine releases have just arrived for review. If it wasn’t for Sierra Reed’s Grampians Shiraz I might never have delved deeper into her story, and yet now I consider her to be one of Australia’s most interesting wine producers, and by interesting I mean that she has the ability to convey something bigger than mere flavours. Her wines take you somewhere. The box she sent included six wines; four whites and two reds. I started with the reds because that’s where I started in the first place.

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The 2023 Reed Wines Knife Edge Shiraz is from the Grampians, as it always is, though it’s now from the vineyard next door, which is grown organically. This release is less about pepper and more about stones; its tannin profile is a roll of pebbles, scattered with red roses, splashed with blue and black cherries, sprigged with mint. This is a wine for enthusiasts. It builds from the tannin up, in a way that more commercial releases from this region wouldn’t dare. It’s reductive, it’s earthen and it’s raked with dryness, but with every step the fruit and the flowers come with it. Brutal honesty. This wine has it.

You can tell a lot about a cook by how they make an omelette and, similarly, you can tell a lot about a winemaker by how they make grenache. Sierra wasn’t handed access to the 150-year-old biodynamically-grown vines of Schlieb’s Garden Vineyard at Vine Vale in the Barossa Valley, she had to use all her wit and smarts, but she now makes a wine named Alexia Grenache each year. This is a win for Sierra and a win for Australian wine. “I would call this Australia’s gamay. It’s a self-regulating vine. The first thing grenache wants to tell you is the soil that it’s on. Which is what gamay does.” This wine is a month on skins, a year in barrel, and is never racked or not until bottling. “This vineyard is where my obsession with sand started. It’s picked in flip flops.”

The 2023 Reed Wines Alexia Grenache is a piece of fine bonework. It tastes like gossip, all juicy details and home truths. The glory of this wine is that it’s the variety in its landscape and that’s all that it is. It’s dry. It’s uncompromised. It’s real. If you want to be convinced of Sierra’s story; drink this wine.

Sierra Reed now runs a vineyard. It’s on the west coast of Victoria, in sight of the surf, at Torquay. It’s an established vineyard (35+ years old), though this year Sierra grafted a deal of it over to gamay. There’s never been gamay grown on the Victorian surf coast before. She’s taken semillon off this vineyard since 2020, though 2023 is the first vintage where she’s had complete vineyard control. “Every time I tasted the wines (from before she had control of the vineyard) I thought to myself, breathe. I thought of the canopy in the vineyard out by the coast there, and how if I could just open it up a bit, this wine could breathe, it could let it in.”

The 2023 Reed Wines Lessons Semillon, aged in (used) large format oak, is a bright, vivid, energetic wine with a softness to the mouthfeel and a keen jalapeño-like chatter to the finish. It doesn’t leave you stranded; it takes your hand and leads you along. It’s not just the wine that can breathe; it’s you. But I’d still expect that it will polarise.

2023 Reed Wines White Heart Riesling isn’t from its usual (Geelong) source; it’s from Mount Alexander in central Victoria. Whenever I encounter riesling that is both lengthy and soft, I know that I’m in good hands. Most Australian rieslings are one or the other. This White Heart Riesling is an off-dry style with complex juice-and-rind citrus flavours. Mineral-and-woodsmoke characters splash over the finish. It’s a delight.

“When you see balance in a glass,” Sierra says, “you know you are with someone who has a high level of understanding. That’s an understanding of wine ahcitecture. Balance is mastery.”

Sierra lived for a time in New Zealand, and has a deep affinity for the Waitaki Valley and for the limestone soils she can see in the wines. It’s where she sources the grapes for her 2023 Reed Wines Siren Riesling. The White Heart Riesling (above) is 11 grams residual; this Siren Riesling is 20. Again we have softness and length but here with an extra kick to the fruit intensity. This wine is something. It soars and it darts and it soars back out again. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a wine from Waitaki. It’s an absolute beauty.

The Alexia Grenache is my favourite of the Reed Wines in front of me, partly because I’m always going to choose a red, though for sheer quality the Siren Riesling is as good. I planned to make this my final comment, but I then tasted the 2023 Reed Wines Frequency Botrytis Riesling. This is 173 grams residual, grown in limestone soils, bottled in 375ml lots. It’s a sensational wine, the kick of (bitter) orange to the finish the perfect foil to the sweetness, the head of citrussy steam it builds more than just delicious.

Campbell Mattinson writes for The Winefront.