Directors' Cut named in Top Wines List of 2005

The Winefront Monthly Top Wines of 2005 included:
Heartland Directors' Cut Shiraz 2004
(*Winefront Monthly Best Sub-$30 Red Wine)

Tasting Notes as seen in the October/November edition of Winefront Monthly (as well as interview with Ben Glaetzer)

Heartland Directors, Cut Shiraz 2004: To make this wine they reduce the cropping levels that they use for the $20 shiraz in half (down to 2 tonne/ acre), and then ferment it cool before maturing it in a mix of 70% French oak and 30% American. The extra effort pays off. It’s meaty and savoury and cedary, with spice and a fluid sense of luscious, ripe, delicious fruit.  It’s not heavy, but it’s generous, and there’s a distinct sense of layered, savoury complexity – that subtle, savoury-meatiness is a winner, especially when matched to such gorgeous, well-mannered ripeness. This is outstanding value. Drink: 2005-2010. 93.

Full article: "At a time when all hell has broken loose over the quality and diversity of Australian wine - otherwise known as Halliday Vs Parker Vs Oliver Vs Schildknecht Vs Rich - Winefront Monthly today announced both the list of its best wines available in Australia for 2005, and the release of the (humbly suggested) unique wine book: Winefront Monthly, Collected Reviews 2002-2005.

To Winefront Monthly, of course, the fact that Australian wine offers both genuine quality and rich diversity is a no-brainer - even if a lot of work in a lot of quarters needs to be done to make both that quality and that diversity even more striking. It has to be acknowledged though that the Australian wine scene has undergone enormous change over the past five years, and almost seems to re-invent itself every two years.

This is starkly illustrated by Winefront Monthly's Top Wines of 2005 list - and while, of course, such a list is highly subjective, it's fair to say that almost none of the wines selected is an outrageous choice. In that light, it's worth noting that Winefront Month's top chardonnay of the
year is from the (almost unheard of) Henty region, its best value white from a little known Yarra Valley producer, its best sub $50 red wine a shiraz from the Yarra Valley and its best sub $30 red wine from the Limestone Coast. While the Barossa Valley is, of course, very strongly represented in this list - and potentially provides the year's top scoring wine - this clearly shows how fast things are moving in Australian wine.

Indeed, more than perhaps ever before, to cover Australian wine properly today the reviewer needs to either live in Australia or spend a significant number of months of each year in this country. Australia is not France or Italy: Australia is an incomparably vast continent with vineyards strewn across vast distances.

From Margaret River in the west to Henty in the southeast to the Granite Belt near the north-east coast - these vineyard regions are thousands of kilometres from one another, and span dramatic differences in all aspects of climate and soil. To be on top of Australian wine today takes, simply, an enormous amount of year-in, year-out,
essential legwork. Anyone who judges Australian wine from afar, no matter how extensive their skills, can only ever have a fraction of the Australian wine picture - a statement more true to Australian wine than to, perhaps, any wine producing country in the world. Australian wine today is a bullet in flight.

The Winefront Monthly Top Wines of 2005 list is made up of the top 25 from Australia, and the top 10 international wines available in Australia, as tasted throughout the past 12 months. To make it into these lists a wine must necessarily be of either exceptional quality, or exceptional value.

The aim of Winefront Monthly's reviews are simple: to find the best wines, the exciting wines, the wines that might make you want to fall in love with wine all over again. The reviews contained in this list and in the guide that contains them are, then, deliberately not intended as a technical audit; they are simply the views of a wine lover."