Tony Love
98 Points – Drink 2025 – 2045

Wynns’ flagship cabernet, selected from the best estate vineyards and refined even further from the top one per cent of the harvest. Without question, this wine exhibits the most elite nuances imaginable of dark berry and mint chocolate aromatics and flavours, enhanced by an exciting tension in the palate with energetic acidity pulsating underneath and lively tannins offering support from the sidelines as all the elements swell with promise and delight with immediate pleasure. The structures here suggest extraordinary longevity. Top of the tree. 

Jeni Port
96 Points – Drink 2021 – 2042

Ah, that scent. It’s everything to do with Coonawarra:  eucalypt mixing with earth, briar and Aussie bush and the region’s number one grape variety’s black-hearted intensity. And, so, so snug and inviting.

This may be one of the more relaxed John Riddoch releases of recent times. It seems all set to go right now. The country scents are immediately approachable, so too the woodsy spice, toasty oak and generous fruit. It all but melts on the tongue but do not on any count underestimate the power that lies underneath the surface.

Ray Jordan
98 Points – Drink 2025 – 2045

Oh my, this is such a good wine – as good as any that have been released under this label. It is remarkable that a wine of such finesse and refinement should also have such power and drive. But that’s Coonawarra in a good year, managed with first rate winemaking after the viticulturist has delivered the fruit. Has a slightly liqueur cherry aroma with cool leaf and tobacco leaf nuances. The palate is sublime with the fine weave of tannin, fine grained oak and silky-smooth fruit. As you might expect it is still a little shy and closed but decanting will give you a glimpse of what it will become. 

Ken Gargett
98 Points –

This is Wynn’s flagship wine and justifiably so. Not made every year, as the vintage has to be a good one, it stills manages to sit comfortably with the best cabernets made in this country, and has done so since the very first vintage back in 1982. It is a wine that has great longevity. 2018 is a great vintage for John Riddoch. So careful are Wynn’s with this wine that only the best grapes are used – less than one percent of their finest cabernet qualifies as suitable for the John Riddoch. The wine spends 15 months in “new (18%) and seasoned French oak hogsheads (47%) and barriques (53%)”. So well structured and so finely balanced is this vintage, as they all are, that you can drink it today, but it is a wine which will age and improve for many years. The colour is magenta/dark purple. The aromas are so alluring and while there is oak evident, the wine is so well balanced that it is as close to invisible as one could wish. The fruit envelopes any hint of it. The wine is utterly seamless with a supple creamy texture. Notes of chocolate, blackberries and mint, florals and even the merest hint of red berries. This is certainly the most refined wine in the Collection. It is both elegant and powerful, a very fine line to tread. The intensity is maintained throughout with good acidity and very fine, silky tannins. Thanks to the elegance found here, it is certainly approachable now but it has the structure and fruit to last and improve for another ten, twenty or thirty years. An exquisite cabernet, one of Australia’s best.