Best Winery of the Year 2025: Giant Steps

2025 Winery of the Year

Giant Steps – Yarra Valley, Victoria

Giant Steps in the Yarra Valley has been named the 2025 Halliday Winery of the Year.

It’s always a special moment when a wine wins its category two years in a row. It’s not just an achievement, it’s a revelation. It is because it’s just so extraordinarily unlikely, amid the thousands of wines submitted and tasted, that the same wine will come out top in its category in consecutive years. This is particularly true in a category like pinot noir, where so many of the biggest names of Australian wine push forward. Giant Steps’ Applejack Vineyard Pinot Noir 2023 took out the top pinot noir award this year, as the 2022 did last year.

When the identities of the finalists were revealed at judging, and the winning wine turned out to be Giant Steps’ Applejack, it was a goosebumps moment for many. Moments like this are the seed of legends. Giant Steps, right now, breathes rare air. It’s been an outstanding winery for a long time, but the combination of energy and expertise – and no doubt plenty more besides – that winemaker Melanie Chester has brought since she arrived at the winery in November 2021 has frankly been breathtaking.

The famed Applejack vineyard, which produced the 2025 Pinot Noir of the Year.

Melanie is a force in Australian wine now. She’s not ‘just’ the winemaker at Giant Steps, she’s also the general manager. She’s taken a top‑performing winery and pushed it harder, further. She’s done this so quickly that she’s made it seem matter of fact. It’s not. It’s something. Eight of Giant Steps’ wines scored 97 points or above this year. This is insanely impressive. Sixteen of its wines scored 95 or above. It achieved these scores across cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, shiraz/syrah, cabernet blends and pinot noir.

If Giant Steps does something, it does it superbly. Small changes have been made in the winery under Melanie’s watch but then, given that quality has been high for so long, all that can ever be done now fits into the realm of the ‘one percenters’. As Melanie herself says, Giant Steps is ‘mining away at every little thing that could potentially give us a better product, irrespective of how much pain or how expensive it might be. If it makes better wine, I am all in and I am glad that I have teams in the winery and vineyard who feel the same’.

In recent times Giant Steps has added the prized Bastard Hill vineyard to its armoury. Great chardonnay and pinot noir now come from it. It has produced its first single‑vineyard Sexton Cabernet Sauvignon, along with a single-vineyard Tarraford Syrah. These two new wines won best cabernet sauvignon and best shiraz respectively at last year’s Yarra Valley Wine Show. There’s a restlessness to Giant Steps, an urge. All the wineries nominated in our Winery of the Year section would have made for a fine choice as our winner. But Giant Steps puts its name into our history books so unequivocally. In short, it’s a thrilling range to drink from. We are pleased to announce Giant Steps as our Winery of the Year. – Campbell Mattinson

Giant Steps' chief winemaker and general manager Melanie Chester.

“Everyone wants to win Best Picture, it’s the ultimate Oscar,” says Melanie Chester (who is the Giant Steps chief winemaker and general manager). “We’ve been nominated for it for three years in a row, which for me is a bloody good reflection of consistency.”

“I love the fact that this award reflects the whole cast, the whole squad,” she says. “Every single person on the team, from senior winemaker Mike Latham and viticulturist Ash Wood through to the oenologist who runs our lab, Jess Clark, has that shared vision of making great wines and that sort of uncompromising attention to detail and love and passion that has to go into it. It can’t be understated.”

Previous Winery of the Year recipients were Paringa Estate (2007), Balnaves of Coonawarra (2008), Brookland Valley (2009), Tyrrell’s (2010), Larry Cherubino Wines (2011), Port Phillip Estate/Kooyong (2012), Kilikanoon Wines (2013), Penfolds (2014), Hentley Farm Wines (2015), Tahbilk (2016), Mount Pleasant (2017), Mount Mary (2018), Seville Estate (2019), Jim Barry Wines (2020), Henschke (2021), Yarra Yering (2022), Pooley Wines (2023) and Bleasdale Vineyards (2024). 

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This is an edited extract from the 2025 Halliday Wine Companion, with reviews by James Halliday, Campbell Mattinson, Dave Brookes, Jane Faulkner, Jeni Port, Marcus Ellis, Mike Bennie, Philip Rich, Shanteh Wale and Toni Paterson MW. Cover art by Vera Babida.

Image credit: Giant Steps.