FINALIST - Young Gun of Wine 4th Annual Vineyard of the Year Awards

The highly anticipated Young Gun of Wine 4th Annual Vineyard of the Year Awards list for Australia's top winegrowers has just landed and guess what..... we are thrilled to announce that our very own Graveyard Vineyard in the Hunter Valley has been named a FINALIST once again!

The Vineyard of the Year Awards were created in 2020 to advance the regional identity of Australian wine and promote leading edge sustainability and innovation in winegrowing.

With over 6,000 grape-growers, picking the top vineyards in Australia is no easy task. Inundated with entries since July 2023, Young Gun of Wine and the judging panel have spent months narrowing the field to the 41 that best exemplified the values of sustainability, innovation, provenance and growing great wine, with a ground-truthing process that includes site inspections of a random sample of vineyards across the country.

The Graveyard Vineyard is one of this country’s most significant. It’s mature enough, at a little over 50 years, though that’s not particularly old in this country’s oldest winegrowing region, the Hunter Valley. It’s significant for its history, with James Halliday prominent among the three solicitors that first planted it, with the first harvest ferried by Len Evans’ Bentley to the makeshift winery. And it’s significant for what followed, with the Brokenwood ‘Graveyard Vineyard’ Shiraz becoming one of the towering icons of Australian wine. Today, the vineyard has become solely focused on shiraz, with viticulturist Katrina Barry taking the baton of vineyard manager from her father, managing the site with sustainability as a core value.

“The Graveyard Vineyard is just south of the winery on McDonalds Rd, Pokolbin,” says Barry. “The climate is subtropical with dominant summer rainfall. There are 10 hectares under vine on a gentle east-facing slope, varying in age from the original old vine plantings from 1968 to the most recent plantings in 2009. It is planted entirely to shiraz, with the last chardonnay and cabernet being removed in 2005.”

Read more about the our Graveyard Vineyard here.