Jeffrey Grosset’s love of Riesling began at 15 when his father came home with a bottle to share with the family. This bottle was enough to inspire a young Jeffrey to enrol in the local agricultural college and complete qualifications in both Agriculture and Oenology by the age of 21. After honing his craft in Australia and Germany, he bought an old milk depot in the Clare Valley town of Auburn, founding his eponymous winery in 1981. Since then, through great skill and exceptional vineyard management, this old milk depot has been transformed into one of Australia’s finest wineries.
For almost four decades, the Grosset ‘Springvale’ and ‘Polish Hill’ Rieslings have shown a consistency of style and quality that has earned Jeffrey his unrivalled reputation. The ‘hard rock’ blue slate of the Polish Hill site results in wines that are steely and magnificently age-worthy, while the red loam of the Springvale vineyard gives more open and easily accessible, though no less complex, wines. Such is Jeff’s attention to detail that he noted a small strip (22 metres wide by 300 metres long) in his Rockwood vineyard that produced more generously flavoured wines due to a different soil. As a result, he decided to produce a separate wine from this site, ‘Alea’, which adds to his great canon of Rieslings.
