After 30 years of making world-class Hunter Valley Shiraz, Andrew Thomas’s passion for the variety and his region hasn’t budged an inch. It has allowed plenty of time to refine his craft, and over the years, Thomas’s reds have become purer and more restrained, not least through a more measured use of new oak, more whole berries and gentler fermentations. With all the medium-bodied poise, suppleness and savoury texture you could expect from top-flight Hunter Shiraz, you might say he’s making the truest and best wines of his storied career. Shiraz you can file under ‘pure drinking pleasure’. Kiss Shiraz stands at the summit of Thomas’s red production. It’s a single-vineyard wine from an old, low-yielding vineyard a stone's throw away from Brokenwood's Graveyard. The second single-site wine is Sweetwater Ridge, another old-vine Shiraz from what Thomas calls “a beautiful site” in the Belford subregion. Finally, there’s the hedonistically styled barrel-selection blend, Elenay. Perhaps counterintuitively, Thomas’s top wine is not his loudest expression. He refers to Kiss as the introvert to Sweetwater’s extrovert, with seductively elegant Elenay, which combines both sites, aptly sitting between the two. Like 2021, the 2022 season was cool, wet and viticulturally demanding. Thomas and his crew ruthlessly thinned their crops, ensuring open canopies for airflow and exposure to sunlight. They dropped almost 40% in the already low-yielding Kiss vineyard, dragging yields well below permitted Grand Cru Burgundy levels. The sacrifices paid off. “2022 is a vintage that has produced beautiful, medium-weight, Hunter River Burgundy-style wines,” Thomas told us. And, at alcohol levels around the 13.5% mark, “they're smack bang in the middle of medium weight”. As one of the best at what he does, these Shirazes are uniquely Thomas but quintessentially Hunter. Pucker up, people!