Kumeu River Village Chardonnay 2024

Kumeu River Wines come from 30 hectares of vineyards, predominantly on clay soils overlying a sandstone base. These soil types retain sufficient water at depth, even during the summer months, to ensure the deep vine roots continue to hydrate the vine without excessive vigour. Therefore, the vineyard is completely dry grown without irrigation, a factor that is critical to the quality of Kumeu River’s grapes. Further, the vineyards are trained on a ‘Lyre’ trellis to help optimise exposure to light and increase grape maturity and quality. One of the distinguishing factors of Kumeu River’s wines is all of the grapes are harvested by hand. This allows the opportunity to remove sub-standard grapes by hand; the result is a net yield of purely high-quality grapes.

In 2023, Kumeu vineyards Hunting Hill, Coddington and Mate's copped a 12 hour deluge of rain four weeks before harvest, even instances of flash flooding.  Luckily, there was minimal vineyard damage. By harvest time, the fruit all looked amazing on the vine, but due defoliation, there were leaves available to continue the ripening process. Over at Rays Road vineyard in Hawkes Bay (acquired in 2017), while it did not get the January deluge, it did endure the wicked weather that came with Cyclone Gabrielle. At 180m altitude, the vineyard wasn't affected by flooding, but the rainfall also reduced yields as was the case with Kumeu. Both Kumeu and Rays Road had earlier harvests than usual, but the wines still have the zesty minerality and vibrancy that is typical of that limestone soil. As always everything was harvested by hand, allowing for meticulous triage so that only high quality fruit made it to the presses. For the 2023s no new oak was used during fermentation, of course having such a small vintage meant that the proportion of 1 and 2 year-old barrels was much higher than usual, and the oak feel to these wines is very similar to a normal vintage. 

A few weeks after vintage was over, and the ferments had settled down, the wines in the cellar were looking very good indeed. Overall the 2023s are certainly lighter with reduced yields, more ethereal in style compared to the last four years, but as ever individual vineyard terroir is on full display, shining through strongly with impressive precision, giving that strong sense of place and vineyard character.