FEW wines have the capacity to divide quite like chardonnay.

It’s too oaky, it’s too buttery, too acidic, not acidic enough …you name it, the grape’s detractors have strongly felt opinions that don’t seem to affect other varieties nearly as vehemently. Except sauvignon blanc, perhaps.

Chardonnay’s most ardent fans, on the other hand, reserve an enthusiasm for the wine approaching that which reformed smokers have for non-smoking spaces.

The most intense of these, of course, are “Burghounds” whose reverence of just about anything from the world’s most expensive wine acreage eclipses the possibility of acceptable substitutes made anywhere else. Had Pavlov decided to conduct his famous experiment with these people instead of drooling dogs, he might well have found the word Meursault provoked the same reaction.

All of which is rather odd when you consider that chardonnay is the most widely planted white grape in the world. There is not a major wine region in the world that does not produce it. Most produce exceptional examples that are recognised globally.

Blank sheet

Chardonnay is an adaptable variety that thrives in conditions ranging from warm and humid to cold and dry. But, most importantly, it provides pretty much a blank sheet for the stylistic designs of the winemaker.

All of chardonnay’s previously mentioned attributes apply equally to Australia as anywhere else. It is grown in every major wine region from Queensland’s Granite Belt to Western Australia’s Great Southern. In a country with the same continental landmass as the United States, that encompasses just about every climatic condition, altitude, geography and contour that nourishes chardonnay elsewhere in the world.

So you’d ordinarily expect a great Australian chardonnay to come from just about any of them. And they do.

Australian wine shows assessed 3370 chardonnay exhibits last year. The Top 100 labels – which account for just 7 per cent of all individual chardonnays seen at the shows – include examples from each of the variety’s traditional Australian strongholds: Adelaide Hills, the Yarra and Hunter Valleys, Margaret River, Beechworth, Tumbarumba and Tasmania.

Western values

But it is the westernmost of these that dominates. By a lot.

Margaret River accounted for 28 of the Top 100 chardonnays in 2025. The next biggest was the Adelaide Hills with 16. The Hunter Valley (13), Yarra Valley (11) and Tasmania (9) round out the top five.

Margaret River’s dominance was even more pronounced in the Top 20 (see our list below). The region accounted for more than half of that exclusive tier with 11 entries. The next best was the Hunter Valley with three.

These differences are not small; they are statistically significant. Margaret River is the clear outlier when it comes to chardonnay. Its performance among the Top 100 wines is significantly better than the “middle pack” of regions that follow it. Incidentally, these four are considered to be statistically indistinguishable from each other.

So what is it about Margaret River that makes its chardonnay so much better than other Australian regions?

GinGin Genie

Winemaker Julian Langworthy credits the region’s unique GinGin clone for much of Margaret River’s success.

“It’s only ever the fruit,” he told mattsays.com. “There’s no polishing turds by any means. There’s lots of great chardonnay programs around the place. But I think it’s a combination of that amazing fruit weight and amazing natural acidity. It’s a pretty cool combo.

“And then I think the third thing, for me, must be where we are. But it’s the GinGin clonal material. You get really quite powerful, structured chardonnay. There is real white tannin kind of appeal to the wines.”

Some industry authorities describe GinGin as a regional name for the popular Mendoza clone. But Langworthy, who is chief winemaker for the Fogarty Hall group, believes the local version is much closer to the American Wente clone that underpinned much of California’s plantings following Prohibition.

“It definitely has phenological similarities to Mendoza,” he said. “But there’s a lot of differences as well - especially in the fruit spectrum and the depth and density of fruit and some of the weight you get. But they look ampelographically the same which is why they’re always referred to in a similar fashion. But they’re probably not that similar in terms of their heritage and where they came from.”

Acid test

Langworthy said the clone’s characteristic “hen and chicken” bunch formation, which produces small, unripe berries among the clusters of larger, ripe ones, was more pronounced and produced higher acidity than comparable Mendoza vines.

“It’s hard to compare,” he said. “GinGin’s not really grown anywhere else because of the virus load. And it is a bit of a heartbreak clonal material. It really does not crop very well. So - winemakers delight, grape growers folly.”

Langworthy said GinGin fruit outclassed all other chardonnay clones processed by his group’s wineries and comprised all of its top labels despite its drawbacks.

Still, he also agreed that the winemaker’s stamp contributed heavily to chardonnay’s final product.

“House style is huge in chardonnay and, I’d say compared to cabernet, much more pronounced for our own sort of stuff that we do,” he said. “It’s a tricky one. You can never create something amazing without amazing fruit. But you get two different winemakers, the same batch of Chardonnay and you get very different results. So I’d say [the winemaking contributes] almost 50:50 in a single instance.”

Despite this, Langworthy felt regional differences between Australian chardonnays were readily perceptible.

“I do particularly like Adelaide Hills and Beechworth,” he said. “Tassie’s yet to produce its best chardonnays, but they’re getting better every year.”

“Hunter was always a bit more bombastic, will have more colour and strays more into yellow fruits. Whereas the Yarra wines generally …are a bit finer, have a little less fruit detail and maybe a bit more wine making artifacts.

“Adelaide Hills is a tricky one because it’s quite diverse through some of the sites there. But I think Adelaide Hills vintage variation is huge. In good vintages, they do get a lot of fruit weight more akin to Margaret River than Yarra and they do get a really nice reduction to the wines.

“You start to run more into white stone fruit and cut nectarine in the good seasons there. And with real power and presence on the palate combined with drive.”

Good value

Langworthy admits to being a white Burgundy “tragic” but said top-end Australian chardonnays were competitive with France’s best.

“Look, I think at $80, the Reserve Chardonnay, which is our main focus in our chardonnay program, is a bargain. With the amount of work that goes in that program, fruit yields like below three tonnes a hectare and the sort of sites and the way they’re farmed - I actually think is amazing value,” he said.

“If you can find a wine around the world in another country that offers as much character, interest, ageability and intrigue for that sort of price point - I’d be buying one. But I really don’t think they exist. You cannot get anywhere near that in France from a quality level for that price point.

“I’m not sure where that ends and there’s definitely a breaking point for sure, but I think even with things like Leeuwin Estate - it’s a big production, it’s a distinctive, wonderful wine. It’s $150 a bottle. I still think that is, in the pantheon of world wine, good value.”

Value or not, three-figure chardonnays don’t dominate our Top 20 list. In fact, the average price for a Top 20 Australian chardonnay is the same as a Top 100 chardonnay at $67.

That’s still a steep climb above what most Australians spend. According to Wine Australia, domestic wine consumers pay just $12 per litre or $16 per bottle on average for still white wine . It’s also double the NZ$33 per bottle that kiwi drinkers pay for the Top 20 New Zealand chardonnays we published last week.

Our lists prove once again that price remains a poor indicator of wine quality. Scores were essentially flat across the four price bands observed among the Top 100 wines.

Only Tasmania showed a meaningful correlation between price and quality. However, the sample is not exactly reliable given only nine wines came from the island state.

Lovers of Yarra Valley chardonnay pay the highest price for their wines at an average of $88 but only get the fourth-best region by score. Margaret River is the best region by score but also the cheapest of the top four regions at $68.

Vintage appears to be equally unreliable as a quality indicator – even when focussing on a particular region. Vintage 2024 wines dominated last year’s shows as current vintage entries but 2023 was considered a stand-out year in the Margaret River. This is partially reflected in the wine show results with 2023 Margaret River wines winning slightly more trophies than their younger counterparts but otherwise showing much the same performance in terms of scores.

The same was true across all regions with each of the years 2022-2024 showing comparable average scores across the Top 100.

If you’re looking for any one indicator for wine quality, it might be this: seven of the Top 20 Australian chardonnays came from two winemakers last year. They work for the same company.

Our list of Australia’s Top Chardonnays of 2025 appears below:

Our full list is available exclusively to paid subscribers and follows below:

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A JOURNALIST, a Burgundian winemaker, an educator and a winery equipment supplier walk into a bar…

Unfortunately, this real-life encounter in an underground Auckland wine bar was less the start of a good joke than the introduction to a rather more prosaic debate.

The question posed by your correspondent (the “journalist”) asked which new grape variety New Zealand winegrowers should consider planting as their next “big thing”.

Everyone had their pet variety: cabernet franc, albarino, barbera and syrah – although three of these are already well established and, in albarino’s case, getting noticeable traction with consumers.

Each of the debaters’ favorites were dismissed by the others before discussion turned to the resurrection of chardonnay.

Unlikely saviour

Chardonnay’s potential role as the saviour of New Zealand’s flagging winemaking scene seems unlikely given its long-standing establishment in the country.

It is the third most-widely grown grape in New Zealand – although it has fallen nearly every year in terms of acreage since 2016 like nearly every other variety. Chardonnay is also a distant fourth in terms of NZ wine exports behind sauvignon blanc, pinot noir and pinot gris.

The grape has had plenty of time to prove itself locally and some of the country’s top examples have been exulted by global luminaries like Jancis Robinson.

It should also be said that two of chardonnay’s protagonists that evening – the Burgundian and the wine-barrel distributor – were heavily invested in the variety.

However maybe they are onto something. According to one major retailer, chardonnay has now overtaken sauvignon blanc as its second biggest-selling variety behind pinot noir. And not just any old chardonnay but the full-fat style purists thought they’d left behind 25 years ago.

Big is best

Michael Ormandy, owner of Christchurch-based Vino Fino, said the fuller style was particularly favoured by ladies of a certain age who had turned their backs on sauvignon blanc.

“There’s two distinct camps with our buyers,” he said. “We still get the ones that are loving those bigger-is-better styles. So that Californian, American oak, big buttery, butterscotch thing we get multiple times every day. That’s very much driven by the customer you’d imagine: maybe the slightly middle-aged, older ladies. They love that style.

“And then probably the slightly more discerning customers, if I can say so, who are definitely much into that sort of Burgundian style, which New Zealand does very, very well. And obviously we’re seeing some excellent Chardonnays coming out in that good, classic all-around style.”

Trendy Chablis

Ormandy said chardonnay’s return to favour started about 10 years ago as familiarity set in with New Zealand’s sauvignon blanc revolution. But it was the fuller, heavily oaked style exemplified by Californian chardonnays that wooed the variety’s devotees back instead of the more austere, unoaked style then in vogue.

“Actually, Chablis has definitely had a big resurgence,” Ormandy said. “But it’s very much a certain buyer that is looking for that. They understand what that sort of crisp, oyster shell character is. Chablis very trendy but, in the most part, the general punter is looking for the more golden fruits and more your [warmer climate] sort of style.”

While nearly all of Vino Fino’s chardonnay sales represented fruity, full-flavoured local labels, buttery Californian styles remained popular.

This trend hasn’t gone unnoticed by New Zealand or Australian producers who are churning out new labels that prominently advertise “butter” on their bottles. Even Fourth Wave Wines, an Australian wine marketer that shot to prominence with the release of its Elephant in the Room label, has released a “buttery” version of its original label for good measure.

Elephant in room

Fourth Wave’s Elephant in the Room label was devised more than 10 years ago when its principals noticed consumers vastly preferred oaky, malolactic styles of chardonnay to the “lean, green” styles promoted by wine’s thought police at the time.

But whereas the original label is described as “full bodied and mouth-filling”, the buttery version goes a step further: “[The wine is] more fuller, richer and rounded than the standard Elephant Chardonnay,” the producer says. “It has more oak influence, buttery characters and more complexity. Though fresh, it is heavier on the palate due to the oak and buttery influences. Softer in acidity.”

The return of buttery chardonnays isn’t the variety’s only trend. According to Ormandy, overtly reductive styles were starting to wane. Reduction is a winemaking technique that promotes sulphide aromas such as flint, struck match and gunpowder. Its use became widespread among smaller winemakers as an alternative reaction to the unoaked styles that preceded it.

While many of Vino Fino’s customers gravitated towards medium-bodied Hawke’s Bay chardonnays, Ormandy acknowledged the growing acceptance of Marlborough labels driven by familiarity with the region’s sauvignon blancs.

“We get people that come in and say ‘I want a Hawke’s Bay chardonnay’,” he said. “That [region] sort of captured the people’s imagination similar to Central Otago pinot noir. Most people that aren’t wine people know that as a category and so Hawke’s Bay chardonnay is very much a case of - if you think of New Zealand chardonnay - that’s where they go.

“Most people understand that the further north you go [it’s] hotter, riper; the further south you go [it’s] generally cooler and a bit more acid. I think Marlborough sits in that perfect sweet spot where you get best of both worlds, really, which is why it’s so successful.

“There’s so many strong brands there that people know from sauvignon blanc so it’s easy for them to associate the quality, maybe, with the producer there. And there’s still really good pricing on Marlborough chardonnay. I think some of the top Hawke’s Bay ones are now getting a bit pricey but Marlborough is still catching up there.”

Southern value

That observation is borne out by the Top 20 chardonnays ranked by us from last year’s wine show scores. Judges assessed more than 400 NZ chardonnay exhibits last year across 267 individual labels.

Although the Top 20 are dominated by Marlborough - with 13 labels compared with seven from the Hawkes Bay - average wine scores for the two regions are roughly equal. However, Marlborough offers materially better value at this top tier. The same scores attract about 30 per cent lower prices. Hawke’s Bay’s strength is premium bottles ($40+).

Ormandy said the sweet spot for chardonnay sales was around $25 – close to the average of the Top 20 Marlborough chardonnays. The category also exhibited a noticeable gender bias with women preferring sweeter, fruitier styles compared with men choosing leaner, drier styles.

“I think generally the older the palate or the older the person, the more they need that sort of big flavour hit to make them recognize what they’re drinking,” he said.

“Although they probably don’t admit that they like sweet things, there’s a little bit sweetness there - they do actually enjoy it. It’s not huge, like American styles but maybe five to seven grams or something like that - just sort of detectable. There’s a similar sort of thing in pinots for us as well. We find some of our best-selling pinots - when we look at the tech notes - they actually do have a bit of residual [sugar] in there.”

Sweet or dry, buttery or not - it’s all a long way from chardonnay’s darkest days just when winegrowers lamented sauvignon blanc’s rise meant the golden grape’s “ABC” - Anything But Chardonnay.

Our free list of New Zealand’s top chardonnays of 2025 appears below:

Our full list is available exclusively to paid subscribers and follows below:

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