Campbell Mattinson's best wine moment of 2023

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 chardonnay wines, which is the number of chardonnays that we tasted for the current edition of the Halliday Wine Companion. 

The 17 best of these chardonnays were sent to our annual Awards judging, and there we tasted them blind. Chardonnay is arguably the variety that Australia does best, and so any one of these 17 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 from all the tasters, including my own. Because the chardonnay bracket was so strong, we whittled the 17 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).

There were 1041 chardonnay wines tasted for the 2024 Companion.

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 it 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, 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 Companion, and so it was me who had put this Landaire wine 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.

The Padthaway chardonnay took home Chardonnay of the Year and White Wine of the Year at the 2024 Awards.

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 – that was my best wine moment of the year. It was a giant killing moment. It was 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.

And not only that – I particularly love this moment because it speaks, in microcosm, to the beauty of Australian wine. We make great wine in this country, as we all know, but just as importantly: it can come from anywhere. There’s no pre-ordained hierarchy, it doesn’t matter what the label says or how much it costs or who made it or where it’s from, everyone has an equal chance.

View the latest chardonnay tasting notes.