Top 100 Wines 2024: Taster's pick

We've revealed the Halliday Top 100 Wines 2024 as selected by the Tasting Team. The 100 wines are split into six categories: Australian sparkling, white wines under $40, white wines over $40, red wines under $50, red wines over $50 and, for the first time, the taster's pick.

The Halliday taster's pick is awarded to a wine by a member of the Halliday Tasting Team. These wines are the personal highlight of all the wines the tasters have reviewed across the last 12 months. The taster's pick is a mark of excellence and only one nomination per Halliday Tasting Team member is permitted.

Below, the Tasting Team tell us the stories behind their highlight wine.

Toni Paterson MW

Skilfully traversing tradition and modernity, today’s Hunter Valley winemakers craft wines that respect tradition, while appealing to the sophisticated palate where vibrancy and freshness are key, and fruit is at the fore. One of the leading players in the region is Silkman Wines, a micro-brand that combines fruit from the region’s best vineyards with expert winemaking to create a mesmerising range of wines. They have set a new narrative for the valley and are part of a broader wave of winemakers who are redefining the style of Hunter Valley wine.

Across the range, the Silkman wines are stunning, from the complex, ageworthy chardonnays and classic semillons to the medium weight shiraz. Among its standout labels is the 2022 Silkman Wines Reserve Shiraz Pinot Noir ($60). It is a fragrant, expertly made, medium-weight red that slips into any setting with ease. Supple, fragrant, long, and flavoursome, it's a contemporary interpretation of this historical Hunter blend – crafted by the winemaking duo Shaun and Liz Silkman. Liz was named the 2025 Halliday Winemaker of the Year.

Shanteh Wale

Chardonnay from the Orange wine region has seen a remarkable increase in quality over the last 10 years. This comes as no surprise, given the ideal growing conditions for chardonnay within the Central Ranges Zone. Orange’s high altitude, which defines its boundaries, combined with mild to warm midsummer temperatures and cool to cold nights, creates true cool-climate growing conditions. Canobolas Wines, which was managed by the Smith family since 1986, is now under the careful stewardship of the Mattick family. In their first-ever vintage, they have produced a chardonnay that perfectly captures the flavours of its unique cool-climate, high-altitude origin, with grapes from sacred, restored old vines.

The care and attention to farming organically has paid off in full. This is a modern Australian expression of chardonnay that showcases a refined understanding of the balance between fruit, texture, and energy, achieved with a judicious use of oak and a sensitivity to creating a harmonious end product. It stopped me in my tracks and had me staggering and stuttering for words, and that doesn't happen very often.

Philip Rich

Mulline is one of the (if not the) most exciting new wine brands and producers to make their presence felt over the last decade. And while every wine in the meticulously put together range can be purchased with confidence, the syrah has been the star performer at the Halliday Awards judging over the last two years. Last year with the 2022 Single Vineyard Bannockburn Syrah, and this year with the 2023 Single Vineyard Barrabool Syrah.

Mulline has come within a whisker of winning the category! They are the epitome of medium-bodied, fragrant, elegant but still concentrated and structured cool-climate syrah. 

Mike Bennie

It's one of those wines that demands the status of 'unicorn' so infrequently seen in the wild. But for those who have an allocation, stumble onto a wine list with it on offer, or enjoy the largesse of friends with good cellars, this is at the pinnacle of elegance and concentration, with a succulent and svelte tannin profile and general sense of inimitable detail of dark fruit, sooty spice savouriness and that 'Aussie bush character' that defines Wendouree wines. There’s a kaleidoscope of fruit and herbal descriptors in berries, plums, cherry, sage leaf, eucalyptus, sandalwood and clove set amongst the pulverised rock minerality so keenly associated with Wendouree’s best releases.

While it is a wine for impossibly long spells in dark, cool cellars, this release is simply sublime and a wine I felt glad to drink in its vigorous youth. That being said, if patience and longevity are on your side, you could be drinking this with glee over 30-or-more years. Such is the way of the great Wendouree wines.

Marcus Ellis

I have said on many occasions, and sometimes quite emphatically, even loudly, that grenache, and McLaren Vale grenache in particular, is the most exciting category in Australian wine right now. And while I firmly stand by that, Steve Pannell’s 2021 shiraz trio from Koomilya shows just how thrilling Vale shiraz can be. It’s a vineyard where Steve sourced fruit from for his first Jimmy Watson win, and it’s the one site that he kept going back to. Farmed with care and made with a light hand, it’s a place he thought could imprint itself on a wine like few others.

Steve and Fiona have owned Koomilya since 2012, and it has been farmed organically (not certified) and regeneratively from day one. The block wines are only released in top years, and it’s no secret that 2021 was a great season. Each wine is distinctly nuanced by the characteristics of each block, rather than the elaboration, and inseparable in terms of quality. For its lucidity of site expression, depth, effortless power and drive of supreme tannin, the JC Block leads the way for me. It is a thrilling wine with a pre-technology feel but a modern eye to purity. It will cellar superbly.

Jeni Port

Beechworth deserves recognition as one of Australia's most important chardonnay regions. Does it get it? Well, if more consumers seek out wines such as this, it will. Adrian Rodda is a master of the grape and has been honing his craft for many years. The Smith's vineyard is a much sought after block, planted in 1978, high in elevation (550m) and sharing shale and grantic soils. Its site and style is intrinsically, essentially Beechworth with an absolute purity of fruit expression, natural balance and electrifying acidity.

Jane Faulkner

When Joshua Cooper sent a potted history about his 2022 Balgownie Vineyard 1970 Block Cabernet Sauvignon, I knew this would be something unique and special, but I didn’t expect to respond so emotionally. I wrote the 'wine smells of nostalgia yet a promise of things to come.' Why? Joshua sources old-vine cabernet off this famed vineyard because he is a lover of Balgownie wines from the 1970s and 1980s, it’s why many feature in his cellar. It’s the site, he says, full of Ordovician shale, quartz and ironstone rubble; it’s a special place, producing fruit of detail and concentration. The result showcases his most prized characteristics of a wine – effortless complexity and power without weight. While his interpretation is contemporary, there’s more than simply respecting the past, Joshua’s wine doesn’t exist without the history. That’s respect. It is also rare these days for a wine to evoke memories yet the aromas, the flavour, the structure of this cabernet reminded me of my dad, or rather the wines we used to share. That’s poignant.

Even the tasting note Joshua wrote is exquisite, saying in part: 'The wine makes one sit up and focus. Refined and complex, the palate flooded with wave upon wave of cabernet fruit, braced by a strict but not overbearing tannic structure, finishing with sweet violet and cassis.'

He adds that it is the most refined of his six ’22 cabernet cuvées. Joshua is clever, insightful, somewhat obsessive, he's a renaissance man; his love of wine history is palpable, his skill as a winemaker unquestionable. Producers like him fill me with joy and hope about the future of Australian wine. Proof is in this bottle.

Dave Brookes

Fraser and Andrea McKinley's Sami-Odi wines are in the groove, none more so than the 2022 Hoffmann Dallwitz, a cask selection of cask selection from some of the oldest vines off Adrian Hoffmann's renowned Ebenezer vineyard in the Northern Barossa. Fraser's obsessive attention to detail – with everything from vineyard management, picking decisions, cellar work and blending – manifests in the glass through stunning fruit expression, density and harmony, leaving those lucky enough to imbibe a glass with the purest impression of soil to glass transparency available.

This attention to detail carries though to the packaging that features label artwork crafted by the McKinley clan; often a bricolage of objects collected on their travels, each year different and etched with memories and meaning, much like the wine itself, perfectly capturing the nuance of a particular site, from a particular year with a minimum of artefact and winemaking pretence. These are world-class wines and Sami-Odi is the flag bearer for the new Barossa.

The Tasting Team with James Halliday.

Panel Decision

The wines below were decided by the Tasting Team as a collective.

Taste the Top 100 events

Taste the Top 100: Melbourne
Thursday October 31, 2024
Panama Dining Room, Fitzroy
Book here

Taste the Top 100: Sydney
Wednesday November 6, 2024
Doltone House, Sydney
Book here