Shiraz is Australia’s most widely-planted variety, and we produce millions of litres of wine from it every year. While much of this wine is designed to be consumed relatively young and fresh, Australian producers also make shiraz-based wines of impressive structure that have the ability to agree gracefully in the cellar for years – and in some cases decades – slowly gaining layers of complexity and earthiness while losing some of their tannic grip. The good news is that you don’t have to inherit a cellar or jostle for wines at online auction sites to experience the beauty of aged shiraz – many producers hold back portions of their stock to sell as a ‘museum release’ when the wines reach maturity. As Australian shiraz approaches a crossroads, with too many vines in the ground and not enough buyers, can these museum programs help reignite our love affair with this quintessentially Australian variety? We felt that a Deep Dive was in order to find out.

We gathered every example of museum-release Australian shiraz that we could find – that is, aged stock that is available for purchase directly from the winery in some form – and set our expert panel the task of finding the wines that compelled the most. All wines were tasted blind, and each panellist named their top six wines. Below are the wines that made the panellists’ top-six selections from the tasting.

Our panel: Rory Lane, winemaker, The Story Wines; Andrea Roberts-Davison, lecturer in viticulture and winemaking, Melbourne Polytechnic; Mitchell Tiller, sommelier, Circl Wine House; Tully Mauritzen, wine buyer, Vinomofo; Tom Robertson, general manager, Alimentaria; James Scarcebrook, winemaker, Vino Intrepido; Stuart Dudine, winemaker, Alkimi; Alec Gribble, sommelier, Marion and Cutler & Co.

2014 De Iuliis Shiraz, Hunter Valley $175 RRP

Chosen in their top six from the blind tasting by Lane, Mauritzen and Roberts-Davison, this was a wine that Lane described as “such a hit of spice! Milk chocolate and eucalypt, nutmeg and five-spice, cherry-red fruit driven by fresh cooling acidity, all resonating and building to a bell-clear finish,” noting its lighter weight but harmonious maturity, “like best friends singing classic songs.” For Mauritzen, it was “completely different to what I was expecting,” perhaps not instantly identifiable as shiraz, but all the more captivating for it, with “burnt sugar and maraschino cherry notes” layered with raspberry, violet, rose and aniseed – a wine that “feels like one you want to eat rather than drink,” terroir-driven, concentrated and youthful, “a shining star … with concentration for days.” Roberts-Davison admitted it made her “do a double take,” picking up black pepper, raspberry, cedar and chocolate, with savoury spice leading into juicy fruit, “plush, youthful, and totally addictive … vibrant acidity, silky tannins, and just enough chocolate and tobacco to suggest it’s only just starting to think about ageing. Long, luscious, and definitely worth hoarding.”

The backstory

Shiraz is Australia’s most widely-planted variety, and we produce millions of litres of wine from it every year. While much of this wine is designed to be consumed relatively young and fresh, Australian producers also make shiraz-based wines of impressive structure that have the ability to agree gracefully in the cellar for years – and in some cases decades – slowly gaining layers of complexity and earthiness while losing some of their tannic grip. The good news is that you don’t have to inherit a cellar or jostle for wines at online auction sites to experience the beauty of aged shiraz – many producers hold back portions of their stock to sell as a ‘museum release’ when the wines reach maturity. As Australian shiraz approaches a crossroads, with too many vines in the ground and not enough buyers, can these museum programs help reignite our love affair with this quintessentially Australian variety?

It’s practically impossible to overstate just how important shiraz is to Australian wine culture. Despite the growth of so-called ‘alternative’ varieties over the last decade, shiraz was the most-harvested wine grape variety by weight in Australia for nine out of the past ten years, with chardonnay briefly snatching its crown in the 2024 vintage. Four out of five Australian wineries currently makes shiraz, and the variety represents nearly half of all of our planted red-wine grapes, and nearly a quarter of the country’s total wine production. We’re also number two in the global production league table for the variety, behind only its homeland of France. Shiraz is therefore practically synonymous with Australian wine – and not just because most of the rest of the world calls it ‘syrah’. (Some producers in South Africa also call the variety shiraz – but only because it first arrived there from Australia, rather than from France.)