99 points - “A remarkable grenache that captures much of the wine-making and viticultural philosophy with this wine sourced from the bush vine Wilson’s Pool vineyard. The fruit was hand-picked, berry sorted and gravity fed to French oak fermenters where 30 per cent whole bunches and wild fermentation have accentuated the bright spicy characters. The oak is all fine-grained, large format season French, which did its thing for 10 months. The oak continues to play a more subordinate role with a greater percentage of whole bunches being used these days. Coupled with the earlier picking approach, it captures the coolness and crunchy freshness style that is becoming the hallmark of the style. The palate is unlike any other Australian grenache, with its precise arrow-straight acidity fired with telling accuracy to a target that eventually reveals deeper succulent fruit flavours. It is still tightly wrapped with firmness and tension. A wine of a touch of brash youthfulness and serious intensity.” - Ray Jordan (businessnews.com.au)

98 points - “Cherries, dark raspberries, a little balsamic, some boysenberry exoticism and ethereal spices. Pure and deeply layered. A fragrant fleshiness up front, a plushness to the mid-palate with exquisite gravelly tannins pushing through velvet sheaths to shape the wine and lengthen the finish.” - Nick Ryan (The Weekend Australian)

96 points - “A serious grenache that delivers more depth and woody spice than the ‘estate’ stablemate, though not without the vineyard stamp of game meat savouriness, violet floral lift, sweet spices, ferrous grunt and depth of cherry and berry fruitiness. This wine feels warmer and richer but loses no finesse in the deeper realms of grenache. There’s peppery elements here, too, almost a sweet, turned-earth character and more olive, sea spray and salt bush going on. Tannins sweep through the wine with succulence and feel tight and granitic. It’s curiously refreshing and inky in the same frame. Stellar, is the byword.” - Mike Bennie (The Wine Companion)

19.5/20 points - “2023 Swinney Farvie Grenache has a stunning nose, and it is brutally firm on the palate. It slams your taste buds shut only to open them again to see if they are still alive, and then it invades again without hesitation with extremely forceful and powerful purple fruit notes… The tension on the finish is what sets this wine and its siblings apart. It is unique from these varieties’ perspective. This is one of the most impressive Farvie Grenaches to date, and it continues a run of wines that defies comprehension.” - Matthew Jukes (matthewjukes.com)

92+ points - "It’s quite minty and has a toasted peanut character, cherry and raspberry, game meat, white pepper, and baking spice oak. Medium-bodied, a dry and grainy grip to tannin, chamomile and mint mouth-perfume, kind of drying and firm, with a gummy finish of good length. It’s an excellent wine, no doubt, but the extract and minty/sappy character is not my preferred style. What it offers in terms of power, extract and impact, is perhaps, offset by a lack of charm and ease of drinking." - Gary Walsh (The Wine Front)

Take a walk through Swinney’s untrellised Grenache bush vines, and things change about halfway down the block planted in 2004 on the estate’s upper northeast-facing hillside crest. The gravel gets deeper, and there is less clay. “That’s Farvie,” says Rob Mann. This fruit is different, too; it is more ferrous and mineral with fine, velvety tannins and so much complexity. Vines are picked over multiple passes, with only the best bunches from each vine—those sitting in the dappled light of the vine’s architecture—set aside for Farvie.

The bunches are berry sorted, then gravity-fed to French oak for natural fermentation, incorporating 30% bunches. Small bunches and berries in 2023 resulted in fruit of intense colour and concentration, so this year, the wine is 100% Grenache (previous releases have included small amounts of Mourvèdre). The wine spent 11 days on skins before being pressed to large, fine-grained, seasoned French oak vessels, where it matured for 10 months. Rob Mann was happily surprised with the depth of colour in this year’s release: “The bunches were loose, and the berries were small in 2023, so the colour is this amazing deep purple. It’s a freak of a wine,” he told us, “but a very exciting one.”