2024 Merriworth Estate Riesling $31

When Mark McNamara and Kirralea Hatch purchased their Merriworth Road property at Tea Tree in February 2017, it was a very shrewd move by the couple who'd had industry experiences on the mainland and couldn't wait to have place of their own. The former 3ha Third Child Vineyard had been planted by the Skinner family in 1999, Taking on a new Coal River Valley project meant not only taking on well-established vines, the site had established a proven track record for producing quality Riesling and Pinot Noir.

This 2024 single vineyard wine comes from a vintage that was significantly warmer and drier than the one ten year's earlier which produced John Skinner's 2014 Third Child Riesling. That wine received a rave review and 96/100 in Decanter (UK), the English-speaking world's most authoritative wine publication.

Riesling thrives in this warm dry pocket of the Coal River Valley. Merriworth's 2024 falls star bright in the glass and displays similarly pristine aromatics - ripe lemon/citrus fruit, white flowers and a suggestion of white nectarine. The wine flows across the palate with freshness and precision, those same citrus characters being delivered with a subtle lemon rind phenolic character that helps dry the palate and perhaps more importantly makes it such a valuable partner to fatty/oily foods such as smoked salmon.

Riesling in these parts are typically age-worthy. Pooley's Margaret Tribute wine from Cooinda Vale and any number of Rieslings from Pressing Matters and Stargazer Palisander Vineyard nearby provide proof. If bottle-aged wines are your bag, there's every good reason to expect Merriworth's 2024 to continue to improve over the next decade, and possibly beyond. That makes the wine's current cellar door pricing very appealing indeed.

Source: Cellar door tasting and purchase