Xanadu Reserve Chardonnay 2024

Xanadu is quite aware, I am sure, that with two top level Chardonnays in your portfolio you need to show difference. If Stevens Road is immediately, gorgeously, accessible now, then the Reserve Chardonnay is, well, more reserved, tighter, finer, with a more significant role given to what is a striking acidity. In other words, it’s probably going to be the longer keeper of the two – you might say, the first among equals. A strong backbone supports a wealth of white peach, apple, citrussy lemon, grapefruit, lime zest with almond mealiness and hazelnut in the background. It is a deeply concentrated wine, growing in texture and no doubt stature as it ages, with an astounding long finish that just goes and goes. Less outward exuberance, more purity and fineness.

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