The Halliday Wine Companion Awards celebrate the best wines in Australia. Below we introduce you to the 2025 Companion – the bestselling and definitive guide to Australian wine.
When the winds of the world blow fierce in your face there’s only one thing to do: be impeccable. Hold true to yourself, to your line, to your philosophy, to your worth. Australian wine as a business, as an entity and as a drink is in a storm right now, but in the glass, at the quality end, its dignity has never been more intact. It has held true. In these days of judgement, the best of our wine producers are acting impeccably.
Indeed, when we lifted our pens for the final time at our annual Awards judging this year, there was one conclusion that stood above all others: Australian wine is at its balanced best right now. The quality, in a general sense, of our wine has been high for a long time, but various fashion swings toward fuller-bodied or conversely toward leaner and longer styles have now swung to a beautiful, harmonious middle ground.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the arena of chardonnay – Australia’s best‑performing grape – where we not only had our collective socks knocked off by the all-round quality, but also by the sheer number of well-balanced, well-flavoured, well‑delicious examples. When you look through the 2025 Companion, or website, chardonnay hunting. It’s worth every second of your time.
We saw this same celebration of the middle ground in the shiraz class, too. We had ripe versions of cool climate, and elegant versions of warm climate, wines going toe-to-toe. Australian wine finds itself now on neither one fatal shore nor another; an increasing number of our wines sit proudly on the bridge between elegant and bold with, importantly, complex wreaths slung about their necks.
We are here, as a wine-buying guide, to find the best of these wines, and that is what we have done. We found value and we found surprises, as we always do, but it must be said that many of Australia’s best-renowned or ‘icon’ (for want of a better word) wines really did live up to their reputation this year. The best part of our job is finding hidden gems, most definitely, but when an icon wine flexes its muscle and leads the way, it generates its own kind of excitement. When the best of the best prove exactly why they’re considered as such, right there in the glass, all you’re left to do is take your hat off and think: wow.
The 2025 Companion is nothing if not stacked full of wow wines.
If ever there was a good time for Australia’s ‘icon’ wines to be at the top of their game, it’s now. It’s possible that various planting booms of the past – eras where for assorted reasons vineyards were planted everywhere and anywhere at such a rate that suppliers of vineyard stakes, guards and assorted trellising equipment could barely keep up – have caught up with us, and we now make too much wine. One Western Australian producer went so far, earlier this year, as to say that we now make 50 per cent too much wine. That statement was made prior to the reintroduction of China as a viable export destination, which would no doubt provoke some re-estimation, but not necessarily a dramatic one.
We’re not going to pretend here to be the experts on the supply and demand equation, but nor do we operate in a vacuum. We open bottles of wine. We give a frank, unbiased assessment. Whether it be boom or hard times, our process remains the same. But we are well aware that market conditions for many wine producers are challenging. We tasted fewer wines this year than we normally do. Not by a lot, but we noticed that less came in. We hunted out some key producers that have never previously appeared in these pages – Sami-Odi and Jane Eyre among them – as an offset, so the net effect was positive. But the fact that less wine came in said to us that producers were holding onto stock for longer and weren’t yet ready for the next release/review.
The truth is that the wider world of wine has come a long way in terms of recognising just how good Australian wine is. But so much more ground needs to be made up. In world terms, Australian fine wine has more self-respect than general respect – better than the other way around, sure, but still not ideal. Our lead producers, and our lead wines, are the pathway forward. We are fortunate that our best producers are relentless in their drive to be, every year, that little bit better. Australian wine needs them to be.
As a team of tasters, working on this guide, we try to do the same thing: we try to get better each year. Behind the scenes we’ve made various changes, tweaks and improvements (we’ve changed how we class cabernet blends and other reds, for instance). These changes make this guide better. The vast pool of knowledge and nuance injected into our team by the addition of tasters Toni Paterson MW and Marcus Ellis is too an enormous boon. These guys are good. But we’ve made these changes in the context, for the first time ever, of reduced involvement from James Halliday himself. James may not physically have his hands on every page of this edition of the book, as he always has previously. But every day as the editor of this guide I get up and go to work with James on my shoulder. James Halliday is the heart, the soul and the everything of this guide. He always will be.
The winds of the world blow fierce in our face, time passes, new wines are born and raised and made ready for the world. We appraise them with an imaginary James Halliday on our collective shoulders. We’d rather that we had the real thing here with us, raising an eyebrow, cutting to the quick. But as a tasting team, having given our all to this edition of his guide, we think we’ve done him proud, and produced an excellent edition, jam-packed with the kind of wines James too would not only love, but would champion. We hope you enjoy it.
Campbell Mattinson
May 2024
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This is an edited extract from the 2025 Halliday Wine Companion, with reviews by James Halliday, Campbell Mattinson, Dave Brookes, Jane Faulkner, Jeni Port, Marcus Ellis, Mike Bennie, Philip Rich, Shanteh Wale and Toni Paterson MW. Cover art by Vera Babida.
Sami-Odi image credit: Bri Hammond.
