2022 Chardonnay Maté's Vineyard

Despite being in the humid climes of West Auckland, New Zealand's most famous Chardonnay producer continues to provide a benchmark for the rest of the country to emulate. Its tribute to founder Maté, the father of current winemaker and New Zealand's first Master of Wine, Michael Brajkovich, has long been the winery's flagship cuvée, but in 2021 and particularly in 2022, Hunting Hill seems to be vying for Maté’s crown. Increasing vine age is giving Hunting Hill greater substance and firepower each year. The Coddington Chardonnay, made from a single clay-based vineyard that the Kumeu River team lease and have managed for the past two years, hasn’t quite reached the league of Hunting Hill and Maté’s, but it’d still make it onto the podium if Kumeu River had its version of the Olympics.

Even at its so-called entry-level, the judicious handling of fruit, lees and oak offers layered styles. The family has recently added a Hawke's Bay vineyard, Rays Road, to its portfolio - spiraling real estate in Auckland that has priced them out of the local market. Purchased from Trinity Hill, it sits on clay-loess over limestone in the west of the region and is already being bottled as a single vineyard cuvée, plus contributing a portion of fruit to the Village Chardonnay bottling, particularly the fruit produced from clone 95. Named Rays Road, the site will provide the breeding ground for non-virused Mendoza Chardonnay clones and, in the future, will provide the replacement vineyard stocks for Maté's, which is affected by both leafroll virus and trunk disease.

The 2022 vintage was very dry for Auckland. While Marlborough received more than three times the monthly rainfall in February and was slightly cooler than projected, activating botrytis. Auckland, 500km to the north, didn’t face the same pressures. The city and its surrounds experienced a 37-day dry spell from 17 December 2021 to 22 January 2022, which was the city’s second-longest period without rain since records began in 1943. Okay, it was a little muggy in late January, and the first few weeks of February brought a threat of a cyclone that ended up dumping its wet and windy remnants further south, but Kumeu escaped without incident.

New Zealand’s national meteorological service, NIWA, reported that the nationwide average temperature for summer 2021-2022 was 17.8°˚C. This was 1.1˚°C above the 1981-2010 summer average, making it the fifth warmest summer on record, which would suggest that the wines were going to look ripe and rich, but in Kumeu, temperatures did not once hit 30˚°C. As a result, there’s an unexpected freshness to the 2022 wines. They don’t have the firm line of 2021, but acidities are in line with 2019 and 2020. What’s more, there’s extra structure and purpose brought through the evolution of the pressing regime. There’s now just one pressing that goes a little further than it once did. Careful tasters will experience phenolics that contribute to texture, line and length.