Kumeu River Mates Vineyard Chardonnay 2024

The complexity and subtlety are most impressive, with honeysuckle, white flower, ripe pear, flint and vanilla bean aromas. Medium-bodied with a tight and phenolic texture and a long, tight finish. Lots of layered mouthfeel and complexity. Fantastic finish. Drink or hold. Screw cap.

Winemaker Michael Brajkovich, MW, does it again with the 2024 Chardonnay Maté's Vineyard. It is super young and not ready for the grand reveal, but you can’t mistake class, no matter its age. Aromatically, the 2024 is hardly expressive, but this is Chardonnay, so calm your jets—beeswax and honeydew melon for now. The palate is compact and firm, yet it holds a wealth of density at its core. The vintage was a small crop due to poor flowering, so there’s a whole lot of intensity to this. In some years, Hunting Hill challenges Maté’s for top spot, but this year, Maté’s steps up the seriousness level. It leaves you saying, “Now we’re talking.” This is not a wine about fruit, it’s about power and sapidity, grip and karate kicks. It has everything: silken texture and succulence, but it’s nicely pared back. Supremely balanced.

• Fenêtre de dégustation: 2026 - 2044
• Nom du critique: Rebecca Gibb MW

Almond-meal aromas with smoky/flinty background and dried flowers/pot-pourri creeping in as it airs. The wine is tremendously refined and graceful with subtle intensity that builds along the palate, with the kind of focused and precise flavour that you see in top burgundies. Very impressive persistence. A lovely wine indeed.

• Nom du critique: Huon Hooke

The 2024 Maté's Vineyard Chardonnay is mouthfilling and full, easily the biggest and most powerful of the single-vineyard Chardonnays in this 2024 release. "In terms of quality, 2024 is up there with the best of them: 2022, 2020, 2014..." This feels perhaps as statuesque and thrilling as the best of the Maté's so far, with intensity that explodes in every direction on the palate—length and width—with spicy top notes and a thunderous base of yellow fruit. The acidity, as usual, coils and weaves its way across the palate, lacing together the fruit and phenolics with seamless intensity. This is very good.

• Fenêtre de dégustation: 2025 - 2039
• Nom du critique: Erin Larkin

Embryonic with taut, restrained aromas of apple, nectarine and a little white pepper. The palate is surprisingly dense and concentrated and whilst there isn't much fruit showing at this stage, the textural grip, solid underpinning of new oak, and pithy, savoury notes create a beguiling wine. Builds in intensity to a long, sustained finish. Drink from 2032-2042. Tasted Aug 2025.

• Nom du critique: Jane Skilton MW