The Lane Vineyard Estate Syrah 2022

Feel the harmony present in this wine where every individual element combines oh so effortlessly and so elegantly. The Syrah – aka Shiraz – grape now shares top red grape billing in the Adelaide Hills and it’s easy to see why. Works the spice and lively ripe fruit qualities achieved in the Hills’ cool climate and there’s that harmony combining plum, black berries, earth, arresting florals, Aussie bush and smart oak, the latter the result of 20 months in French oak. Oak has been slurped up and combined bringing solid integration and overall balance. Makes for an engaging, smooth textural, complex flow that is spice-fuelled with a lively gentle pepperiness. Hard to ask for more unless you are considering cellaring.

Jeni Port

Wine critic at Winepilot

Jeni Port is one of Australia’s top wine communicators. Based in Melbourne, Jeni created the first wine column in the (then) Sun News-Pictorial before moving over to The Age and becoming that paper’s longest-serving wine writer. Over the years she has written for most Australian wine magazines and these days calls WinePilot home. She is also a Tasting Panel member on the Halliday Wine Companion. She was named Wine Communicator of the Year and Legend of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in 2014 and in 2018 Legend of the Vine. She is a founding board member of Australian Women In Wine and is the co-deputy chair of Australia’s Wine List of the Year Awards and China’s Wine List of the Year Awards.

Wine writer and critic