Mount Eyre Vineyards Three Ponds Hunter Valley Chardonnay 2021

Delivers Hunter Chardonnay’s signature sunny disposition that it is both generous, free flowing and surprisingly intense. Honeysuckle scents rise, to be joined by aromas of baked spice apple, lemon butter, peach and gentle tropicals. Oak plays a role here, it can’t be denied, with fermentation and maturation in French oak. It brings a lovely cohesion to the overall wine and contributes to texture and warmth of nougat flavour, and falls well within smart winemaking limits, something that adds rather than subtracts. Acidity is keen but, once again is managed well, bringing a clean, tight finish and drawing together the wine’s generosity of fruit into something that brings good length and a clean finish. A real exercise in smart wine growing and making in a year that marked a transition from drought to wet with plenty of January rains and with it, disease pressures. Well done.

Jeni Port

Wine critic at Winepilot

Jeni Port is one of Australia’s top wine communicators. Based in Melbourne, Jeni created the first wine column in the (then) Sun News-Pictorial before moving over to The Age and becoming that paper’s longest-serving wine writer. Over the years she has written for most Australian wine magazines and these days calls WinePilot home. She is also a Tasting Panel member on the Halliday Wine Companion. She was named Wine Communicator of the Year and Legend of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in 2014 and in 2018 Legend of the Vine. She is a founding board member of Australian Women In Wine and is the co-deputy chair of Australia’s Wine List of the Year Awards and China’s Wine List of the Year Awards.

Wine writer and critic