2024 Reserve Chardonnay

You could overlook this in its youth, as it’s reticent, yet charming and super savoury. There’s an intensity on the palate with a strong umami note of Vegemite and white miso, nutty lees and lemony/cedary oak. Underneath, some grapefruit and lemon, mouth-watering acidity and superfine texture.

This is a single vineyard chardonnay, with all of the fruit off the original Lagan Estate vineyard that was planted back in seventy-seven. It's a wine of tremendous power and poise, with layered complexity and richness. The regular lees stirring over nine months has heightened this complexity and built a textural character into the wine. As always, winemaker Glenn Goodall has shied away from malolactic fermentation, allowing the precise, edgy acidity to balance the richness of the fruit. Highly floral, with notes of cashew, stone fruit, and an edgy cut lime character. The palate is deeply intense and still tightly wound, although the power of that fruit is just starting to emerge. A wine of tremendous cellaring potential if you wish, but everything is where it should be right now.

"The Stevens Road Chardonnay release from 2024 was emphatic and this Reserve Chardonnay release is another step on from that.

This is a superb chardonnay. Hot damn. It’s so gloriously fruited, so inherently complex, so steely, so pulpy and so sustained. It’s both exciting and pure; it’s sunshine and it’s rain. Grapefruit, steel, white peach, apple core, flint (minor), cedar, brine and tonic water character charge through the palate in the most emphatic fashion. It had me at hello and kept me enthralled through to goodbye.

Xanadu is quite aware, I am sure, that with two top level Chardonnays in your portfolio you need to show difference. If Stevens Road is immediately, gorgeously, accessible now, then the Reserve Chardonnay is, well, more reserved, tighter, finer, with a more significant role given to what is a striking acidity. In other words, it’s probably going to be the longer keeper of the two – you might say, the first among equals. A strong backbone supports a wealth of white peach, apple, citrussy lemon, grapefruit, lime zest with almond mealiness and hazelnut in the background. It is a deeply concentrated wine, growing in texture and no doubt stature as it ages, with an astounding long finish that just goes and goes. Less outward exuberance, more purity and fineness.

Light bright yellow; discreet, reserved aromas at first with some free SO2 and lemon blossom, lemon verbena and grapefruit emerging. The palate has incisive and piercing flavour coupled with vibrant lemony acidity, building to a crescendo on the finish. Margaret River's grapefruit signature looms large here. A superb wine.

Power and restraint in equal measure on first look. Lemon butter, white peach, green herbs, sea salt and subtly sweet shortbread cedar in support. A swirl unlocks ruby grapefruit, yuzu, wet gravel, brine and tonic water as the wine unfurls. The mix of fruit and savoury is arrestingly complete. The palate brims with white peach, lemon juice, fine cedar, brine, salted crackers and ruby grapefruit — all within a pillowy texture cut by citrus-pithy, saline-drenched acidity and a fine vein of phenolics. Brilliant length; it rolls in waves to a seemingly endless close. Powerful and voluminous while remaining fresh and energetic. An outstanding expression worth every cent.