Hãhã Hawke’s Bay Chardonnay 2024
- 93
- $20
- Drink by: 2025-2030
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Here’s a wine that takes advantage of the naturally warmer conditions in Hawke’s Bay after a hot and dry summer, which resulted in some of the best quality grapes for some time. The wine gets a little winemaking influence, including after fermentation ageing on full lees in French oak and then heading through malolactic fermentation before bottling. It’s a deeper colour with a golden hue immediately evident. The nose shows some obvious stone fruit but a lifted cutting edge of red apple and lemon meringue. It has a smooth, creamy, rich texture, and it’s the type of wine you find yourself gravitating to time after time. An impressive, generous full full-flavoured Chardonnay likely to appeal to those who prefer a little bit of grunt in their white wines.
Ray Jordan has been writing about wine for more than 40 years. His first articles were published in the early issues of national wine magazine Winestate in the late 1970s when he worked in Sydney as a newspaper correspondent. From 1989 Ray wrote more than 3000 columns as a regular newspaper wine columnist. He currently writes a regular column for the special business publication Business News and is one of the main contributors to national wine platform Wine Pilot. In 2017 Ray co-authored The Way it Was – A History of The Early Days of the Margaret River Wine Industry and previously wrote Wine in the Blood: Australia’s Family Wine Estates, published in Mandarin and English. In 2011 Ray was awarded WA Wine Press Club Jack Mann Memorial Medal for his contribution to the WA wine industry. His love of wine is as strong as his love of the blues and tasting the thousands of wines that cross his bench each year allows him to indulge in both.
