The art of Reserve: Brendan Hawker on Yering Station's highly rated 2024 Reserve wines

Not every outstanding wine made at Yarra Valley winery Yering Station becomes a Reserve. That distinction sits at the heart of the estate’s most anticipated annual release. The Reserve collection is not simply another tier in the Yering Station portfolio, but the culmination of a process that begins in the vineyard, carefully selecting the finest parcels, then barrels, for the final blend.

The Reserve collection is Yering Station's most aniticapted annual release.

For chief winemaker Brendan Hawker, the starting point is always the same. “What we’re always looking for in a Yering Station Reserve is a balanced wine of purity and elegance, with a great depth of complexity,” he says. “How that is expressed through its components is vintage dependent, and the resulting wines will wear that on their sleeves, always reflective of the season.”

It is a philosophy of selection rather than scale. “The different parcels and varieties are all matured in barrel and we conduct a pretty rigorous regime of blind tastings to identify the outstanding wines of vintage, then the best barrels thereof, and finally work to unlock the best, most complementary combination of barrels,” Brendan says.

The result is necessarily finite. Only the parcels and barrels that meet the standard are considered, meaning the composition and availability of each Reserve release is determined by the quality of the vintage rather than a production target. For collectors, that makes each release a snapshot of a particular season and a particular set of decisions that cannot simply be repeated.

Chief winemaker Brendan Hawker conducts detailed blind tastings to determine the wines.

The 2024 vintage collection brings together four such expressions. The Reserve Chardonnay, which Halliday taster Philip Rich rated 97 points, has “an extra degree of power and oomph”, with ripe stone fruit, cashew and oyster shell leading into an intense, saline finish. The Reserve Pinot Noir earned 96 points, while the Cabernet Sauvignon, also rated 96, was praised for its depth and structure, with the confidence to cellar for at least a decade.

Perhaps the most telling example of the Reserve philosophy, however, is the return of the Shiraz Viognier. Absent from the 2023 Reserve release, it was included again in 2024 after fruit from the Carr Vineyard in Coldstream showed the concentration, elegance and perfume Brendan was looking for. “It was a pretty straightforward decision,” he says. “The hardest part of the decision was which barrels to exclude from the blend, as we were spoilt for choice.” The finished wine earned 97 points from Philip, who described it as “dense yet perfumed”, with dark cherry, cocoa nibs and violets.

These are wines made to offer pleasure on release, but their collectability lies as much in what happens next. “They are so coiled and full of tension, energetic and primary,” Brendan says. With time, “they unfurl further and deepen in their complexity”. For Yering Station, the Reserve collection is the result of countless small decisions made in pursuit of something exceptional: a limited expression of the estate’s finest sites, held back until the moment is right.

Find out more and shop the wines at yering.com