2025 Tolpuddle Vineyard Chardonnay
£59.00
“Tight and intricately detailed, as always, with bright citrus, peach and white nectarine fruits overseen by a mist of flint and struck-match complexity. Hints of grilled hazelnuts, almond butter, vanillin oak, clover blossom, crushed riverstone, crème fraîche, ozone, oatmeal and sea spray. Lightly textural, with a beautiful taut mineral line, the flavours precise and drawn out along its length. This has a tight mineral cadence, a touch of apple-skin pithiness, preserved lemon, nougat and a pristine, sustained finish with a flair of umami. This is a producer and a site that is in the finest of form. No wonder the French are nervous – once again, world-class Australian chardonnay.”
97+ Points, Dave Brookes, Halliday Wine Companion
“A good winter of rain in 2025, on the long-term average, set things up well; warmish flowering brought a strong fruit set, well-timed rain worked its magic through the Coal River Valley, and a mild summer followed – overall cooler than 2024 on the data, delivering good yields and quality. This is a wine that has, since Tolpuddle’s first release in 2013, become one of the benchmarks for Australian Chardonnay – taut, mineral, and precise in a way few sites in the country can match. There’s such allure to the perfume as the wine relaxes in the glass. Cashew cream and white flowers hover above pure and precise fruit – white peach, salted grapefruit, preserved lemon, makrut lime. There’s some saline oyster shell minerality and whispers of fine cedar bringing savoury complexity. The trademark flinty reduction permeates but not aggressively at this stage of the wine’s life. On the palate, there’s both power and precision with a lovely creamy texture cut up by tensile saline acidity and chalky phenolic drive. The fruit notes mirror the nose, carried very long with that classic Tolpuddle crystalline drive and some preserved lemon brininess drenching the close with salinity. Top flight Tolpuddle Chardonnay here. Power and precision in equal measure, and a balance that will see it age brilliantly.”
97 Points, Tom Kline, Wine Pilot
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Product Description
Some of the world’s great vineyards are the product of centuries of planning. Tolpuddle owes its modern story to a road trip. In 2011, Martin Shaw and Michael Hill Smith MW, the cousins behind the acclaimed Shaw + Smith in the Adelaide Hills, travelled to Tasmania with nothing more ambitious in mind than lunch and a tasting of the island’s best wines. Again and again, their favourites came from a single site in the Coal River Valley. By the end of the trip, they had bought it.
The vineyard was first planted in 1988 by two industry legends, Tony Jordan and Garry Crittenden, and its name carries a remarkable piece of history. It honours the Tolpuddle Martyrs, a group of Dorset farm labourers transported to Australia in 1834 for forming one of England’s first agricultural unions. Their leader, George Loveless, served part of his sentence on a property near Richmond, and that very land now forms part of the vineyard. Long before Shaw and Hill Smith arrived, the site’s quality was clear: in 2006 it was named the inaugural Tasmanian Vineyard of the Year.
The 20-hectare vineyard sits just outside the historic village of Richmond, a short drive from Hobart, and is devoted entirely to Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Its gentle slopes of light silica over sandstone face towards the sun, while a rain shadow keeps conditions cool and dry throughout the growing season. The result is fruit that ripens slowly and evenly, with intense concentration of flavour and the vivid natural acidity that has become the Tolpuddle signature. Since taking over, the owners have invested heavily in replanting and re-trellising, applying the lessons of the Adelaide Hills with one simple aim: to make better and better wine.
The wines that result have placed Tolpuddle firmly in the top tier of Australian wine. Released each year to a devoted waiting list, they combine lightness of texture with remarkable intensity. The Chardonnay is fine, precise and mineral, with a backbone of firm acidity, while the Pinot Noir is floral and aromatic, with soft, grainy tannins and a surprising underlying power. It is little wonder that the Halliday Wine Companion has called Tolpuddle perhaps “the greatest single vineyard Australia has ever seen”: a cool-climate jewel and one of the most exciting names in the Southern Hemisphere.
Additional Information
| ABV | 13% |
|---|---|
| Bottle Size | Bottle 75cl |
| Colour | White |
| Country | Australia |
| Critic Score | 97+/100 |
| Drink until | 2040 |
| Style | Still |
| Sweetness | Dry |
| Vintage | 2025 |
