2018 Shaw + Smith Shiraz Adelaide Hills Australia is sold out.

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"Benchmark" Shiraz Wins 95-Point Fame

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  • 95 pts James Suckling
    95 pts JS
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2018 Shaw + Smith Shiraz Adelaide Hills Australia 750 ml

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  • Curated by unrivaled experts
  • Choose your delivery date
  • Temperature controlled shipping options
  • Get credited back if a wine fails to impress

The Last Word in Adelaide Hills Elegance

Our last offer from Australia’s Shaw + Smith was a sellout that we knew would be hard to top. So we raised the bar by going lower on price

Today we’ve got Shaw + Smith’s brilliant 2018 Shiraz for under $30—a stunning value for a red that garnered 95 points from James Suckling and inspired Australian authority James Halliday’s Wine Companion to call it a “benchmark” Shiraz.

We fell in love with Shaw + Smith the first time we put our nose in the glass. Opaque-purple in color, it’s got a very deep red- and blue-berried core, with lifted notes of bramble, black plums, crushed violet, and cracked pepper. Polished, round, and generous with a palate of spices, mint, dried herbs, and black olives, it's balanced by cool-climate vibrancy, with a pretty and elegant level of detail that’s rare in Australia—and all but unheard of at this price.

Shaw + Smith was founded by a dream duo of Aussie wine authorities who happen to be cousins. Michael Hill Smith is vinicultural royalty in these parts, a fifth-generation member of the famous Yalumba dynasty, which runs the oldest family-owned winery in the country. He was also Australia’s first Master of Wine (and is a Cordon Bleu-trained chef to boot). Martin Shaw, a “third brother” in Smith’s estimation, worked closely with the visionary Brian Croser at Petaluma, and was a pioneer in Adelaide Hills winemaking.

Starting out in 1989, the two had originally planned to focus on Merlot, believing the Adelaide Hills too cool for Shiraz. But the two awoke to the incredible potential that the grape had in the region, and by 2002, they had produced their first Shiraz. Within a few years, critics and fellow winemakers were deeming it a masterpiece.

The higher altitude and the wetter your land in Adelaide, Smith tells us, the better your Shiraz. With 55 acres of vineyards that reach up to 1,640 feet and a climate in the appellation that’s considerably cooler than Barossa, freshness and acidity are a given. But that alone doesn’t secure this wine’s famous elegance.

Through the past two decades, Smith and Shaw have leveraged improvement after improvement: sourcing from the best vineyards, using whole-bunch pressing and whole-berry fermentations, and relying less on oak. Today Shaw + Smith’s Adelaide Hills Shiraz is their “most consistently outstanding wine,” according to Halliday’s Wine Companion

The results of that evolution are evident in this wildly successful release, which maintains the bottling’s reputation for balance, yet arrives with heft, braced by meaty tannins. It’s a rare chance to score this kind of quality for under $30.