First taste of the new Shaw & Smith Sauvignon Blanc 2024 at the famous S & S Yum Cha

Shaw & Smith famously launches the new vintage of their venerable Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc with an annual national (and international in some years) Yum Cha lunch extravaganza. It’s always in the depths of winter, and typically, I’m battling a head cold (not this year!), but I try and go every year.

The Sydney leg was on Monday at the brilliant Mr Wong, and again, I was among the throngs of somms, retailers, and wine people queuing up to get in at 1210 p.m.

Yes, it’s a queue, bizarrely, because if you don’t get into this ridiculously popular event on time, you get a cramped table up the back. Luckily, I now get a nametag and a seat on the good middle tables, but fifteen years ago, I was on the outer, fighting with hungry hoteliers to get a sliver of salt ‘n’ pepper squid.

More than a social occasion (bumping into people you haven’t seen since last July), I also RSVP yes because I genuinely like to drink the Shaw & Smith wines (but not actually drinking at an industry lunch on a Monday), and this is a good excuse to taste in situ (even if I also have samples at home). Usually, from Shaw & Smith, you’ll get a Michael Hill-Smith, Adam Wadewitz, or Dave LeMire in attendance for someone worth interrogating (last year, it was Tildie Hill-Smith picking up the baton for a worthy new perspective). There’s also industry goss rippling through the crowd for more colour (who will be the new Halliday editor? Which Sydney restaurant is flying?) and the food, for anyone who hasn’t been to Mr Wong, is the Sydney benchmark for Cantonese food.

Wine lunches/dinners are generally time sucks to be avoided, but not this one…

Of course, the new Shaw & Smith Sauvignon Blanc 2024 was the star of this roadshow, and it’s a handy wine given the context. In the Adelaide Hills, 2024 was a wet and cold vintage, and everyone was scrambling for grapes (although 2023 was even harder for some with tiny yields) and uneven quality, so to see this 2024 Shaw & Smith release looking taut but not hard was a win.

I’ll cover some of the other new releases when I open the bottles at home, but unquestionably, the 2023 M3 Chardonnay was another vintage-defying standout alongside, with the 2022 Shiraz also seriously delicious (and possibly shading the bolder 2021 Balhannah Vineyard Shiraz). I wasn’t enamoured with the 2023 Pinot Noir, so that will be an interesting retaste in the Australian Wine and Drinks Review Tasting Lab (aka my very white kitchen) in the near future.

But back to the Sauv. This Shaw & Smith Sauvignon Blanc 2024 ($33) is very fresh, which is unsurprising given it was grapes just a few months ago, but not angular. It’s more grassy than tropical, with a bit of black texta and pyrazine early picked/unripe fruit character, but also plenty of passionfruit and cut melon. You have to dig beyond the just-bottled banana esters to get a complete view, but importantly, the acidity isn’t unripe; it’s just fresh. The intensity is next level, though, cutting a swathe through everything like the freshmaker 12% alcohol wine it is meant to be, and you come away feeling enlivened rather than attacked (which some young Sauv Blanc can be).

A really good release (and maybe even better than last year), from what will ultimately be a greenish vintage (let’s call it 17.7/20, 92/100).