Tapanappa Tiers Vineyard Chardonnay 2025

Increasingly, I am allowing Aussie Chardonnays a little more time on opening, time to loosen up, to release some inbuilt tension and open to a full reveal. Top Aussie Chardonnays like Tiers call for it. Try and make it a rule and see if it works for you. With time opened, there is a growing warmth to the ’25 Tiers, it’s still quite taut, but it opens up nicely with scents of dusty honeysuckle, nectarine, white peach, citrus, quince and nuts. It’s a complex, fine textured Adelaide Hills Chardonnay off 44-year-old vines which saw fermentation in French oak barriques (one third new) and was aged on full lees. It’s also from a warm vintage, but don’t expect a huge effect on acidity – it’s as brisk as they come.  Brings an inviting thread of biscuits, grilled nuts, clotted cream, quince, melon and citrus to the palate alongside a grapefruit pithiness and green apple crunchiness. Leaves a concentrated, well composed impression in its youth which will come further into bloom with time. It’s very much early days for this wine.

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