My best wine moment of 2023

This article was first published at Halliday Wine Companion. If you want to cut straight to the punch-line: my moment of the year had to do with the Landaire at Padthaway Chardonnay 2021, which won Best Chardonnay at the Halliday awards judging in my first year as Halliday chief editor. My review of the Landaire at Padthaway Chardonnay 2021 on Halliday Wine Companion read: “This is serious business. Indeed the word glorious immediately springs to mind. Toast, flint, grilled white peach, nougat and lemon curd characters come charging at you, first sip until the last, compellingly, authoritatively. Jumps straight out of the box and once it's out, there's no stopping it.” My personal score for the wine was 96/100.

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You never know where your best wine moment of the year is going to come from. This year it came from a sea of 1041 chardonnays, which is the number of chardonnays that we tasted for the current edition of the Halliday Wine Companion book.

The seventeen best of these chardonnays were sent to our annual awards judging. There we tasted them blind. Chardonnay is arguably the variety that Australia does best, and so any one of these seventeen wines could have won our Chardonnay of the Year gong; it became a matter of trying to split superb wine from superb wine.

Spreadsheets are rarely the hero of any story, but the spreadsheet of voting results from this chardonnay taste-off is fascinating. The spreadsheet records all the scores of all the tasters, including my own. Because the chardonnay bracket was so strong, we whittled the seventeen wines down to seven, and then tasted these wines (blind) again. From these seven we selected three, which we tasted for a third time (also blind).

So at no stage did we know which wines we were tasting. In the first round of tasting I had the Hoddles Creek 1er Chardonnay 2021 as my most preferred wine. This wine had enough support from the other tasters to make it through to the second round, and indeed tehn made it through to the final three as well. The other two wines in the final round were Seville Estate Chardonnay 2022, and Landaire at Padthaway Estate Chardonnay 2021.

Padthaway is a quality Australian wine region, excellent for both white and red wines, though it’s generally considered that chardonnay is what it does best. Even so, in 2023, when pitted against the best of Margaret River and the Yarra Valley, Beechworth and Tasmania (among other regions), it’s not unfair to award it underdog status. Indeed these days Padthaway simply, often, doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.

Padthaway is one of the regions that I cover for the book, and so it was me who had put this Landaire of Padthway Chardonnay into the awards-judging line-up in the first place. Ironically though, in no stage during the first or second round of voting did I put it forward, and so if it had been up to me, it wouldn’t have made it through to the third and final round.

By the time it got to that final round though, time had passed. Other panel members were obviously onto it already but for me, it was only once the wine had had this extra time to breathe, and to open up, that its beauty really shone through. The only time I voted for the Landaire was right at the end, by which stage it had become the runaway victor.

When its identity was revealed – this was my best wine moment of the year. It was a giant killing moment, against the odds. It was a moment of which both Padthaway Estate and the Padthaway region should feel immensely proud. A Padthaway chardonnay had become our Chardonnay of the Year. An underdog, can, win.