Winemaker Notes
#10 James Suckling Top 100 Wines of the World 2025
This wine is true to the Tolpuddle Vineyard Chardonnay style: fine and precise with firm acidity, and a combination of lightness of texture and intensity of flavor.
Professional Ratings
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Australian Wine Companion
Ooh-boy the Tolpuddle Chardonnay is in a good place. I guess you could call this vintage a 'classic'. A little more restraint and line than the '23; a little more filigree and nuance, those flinty/struck-match tones a little further back in the mix and woven through the wine in an intricate pattern. White peach, lemon, grapefruit and nectarine fruits are high fidelity and beautifully poised, suffused with soft spice, clover and grapefruit blossom, crushed stone, cinnamon, a murmur of vanillin oak and spiced poached pear, grilled hazelnuts, crème fraîche and a whisper of onshore breeze. Everything is in sharp relief, with the purest of fruit. It's all detail and tension, with a textural glaze of grapefruit pith and a sapid, mineral line that builds like a crescendo before releasing, finishing long and true. It's a stunner.
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James Suckling
Wow. This sits on the edge of reduction, expressing both power and minerality with aromas of struck match, lemon confit, crushed stones, sweet spices, grapefruit and apple blossoms. The palate is highly strung with striking acidity, balanced by a generous, rounded yet restrained mouthfeel. You could easily be in one of the great Climats of Burgundy. Truly excellent from one of Australia’s most celebrated producers.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
I recently tasted the 2024 Chardonnay at a restaurant, and the wine looked every bit the Tolpuddle we know and love: reductive, powerful, spicy, leafy and ultra long through the finish. This was a warm season, with low yields, and the result is one of volume, opulence and statement. This has purity of fruit and structure, and the line of the extract is focused and long, driving across the palate. This is a sensational wine, and it's a clear statement of the vineyard here. The talc-like phenolics really are something. It's an excellent wine and viticulture too. 13% alcohol.
One of the most popular and versatile white wine grapes, Chardonnay offers a wide range of flavors and styles depending on where it is grown and how it is made. While it tends to flourish in most environments, Chardonnay from its Burgundian homeland produces some of the most remarkable and longest lived examples. California produces both oaky, buttery styles and leaner, European-inspired wines. Somm Secret—The Burgundian subregion of Chablis, while typically using older oak barrels, produces a bright style similar to the unoaked style. Anyone who doesn't like oaky Chardonnay would likely enjoy Chablis.
Directly south of the city of Melbourne and the Mornington Peninsula wine region, the cool-climate island of Tasmania has earned an honorable reputation as the country’s finest producer of Sparkling Wine. Naturally the region also excels in top quality still wines from Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Riesling, all distinguished because of a high natural acidity. Most of the Tasmania vineyards cluster around the eastern side of the island from north to south.