The cool growing area of the Porongurup range is an incredibly beautiful, evocative place. At once vast and intimate, it has the capacity to show you open vistas and, at the next turn, tight vignettes of granite outcrops. The Duke's Magpie Hill vineyard is planted on a gentle slope set against a backdrop of one such outcrop. The wines from this vineyard have a pristine quality to them, and this 2021 Magpie Hill Reserve Shiraz is a prime example of what the vineyard is capable of. It offers notes of blueberry, blackberry, cassis, raspberry, squid ink, nutmeg, white pepper and blood plum. It has all of the beauty of the previous vintages, but it feels like the elongation through the finish, which I so admire in this wine, is missing. It is lovely, pretty and pure.