Kumeu River, Hunting Hill Chardonnay, 2025
Kumeu River, Hunting Hill Chardonnay, 2025
- 75cl
- 14.5%
- White Still
- Chardonnay
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Drinking window: 2026 - 2040
Kumeu River needs little introduction to anyone who has followed New Zealand wine with any seriousness. The Brajkovich family have been making a compelling case for world-class Chardonnay from their Auckland base for decades, and Hunting Hill is their single-vineyard statement of intent.
Sourced from a specific hillside block, it sits above their other Chardonnays in ambition and precision — this is not a wine about generosity so much as it is about focus. The 2025 vintage in New Zealand delivered cool, even ripening conditions, and wines with real definition as a result.
What the critics say:
"Floral and fragrant, with white blossoms and a touch of white pepper on top, joined by crushed stones and a hint of raw almond. Medium- to full-bodied and very textural, showing firmness, staying tense and vertical, with a beautiful interplay between the driving acidity and distinct minerality. Finishes stony and citrusy. Drink or hold. Screw cap."
"The 2025 Hunting Hill Chardonnay is ripe and thunderous, with salted peach, walnuts and stewed apple notes. This is flavorsome, opulent and impressively distinct from the Maté's tasted alongside—the vineyards are a stone's throw from each other. This is nettle-y, laden with apple skins and driven by fruit intensity. The acidity remains a concentrated and powerful player on stage here, as with all the Kumeu River cuvées. 14% alcohol, sealed under screw cap."
The Hunting Hill vineyard sits on elevated, north-facing slopes in the Kumeu sub-region west of Auckland, where free-draining clay-loam soils over limestone give the wine its characteristic chalky mineral tension. The hillside aspect extends the ripening season, preserving acidity while achieving genuine flavour development. Kumeu's maritime climate, moderated by the Tasman Sea, keeps temperatures measured and avoids the over-ripeness that can blunt Chardonnay's edge.
Kumeu is a small wine-producing area in West Auckland, historically overshadowed by the South Island regions that put New Zealand on the global map. It operates without a tightly regulated appellation structure in the European sense, but the Kumeu River estate has effectively defined the area's benchmark style through their own work. The region's proximity to Auckland and its humid, maritime climate make viticulture demanding, which is part of why so few producers achieve the precision that Kumeu River does here.
The 2025 vintage in Hawke's Bay is recent enough that our knowledge of the full picture is still forming, so we'll be straight with you: detailed meteorological data for this harvest is not yet something we can speak to with confidence. What we do know is that Hawke's Bay continues to assert itself as New Zealand's most serious red wine region, and growers with the best-drained Gimblett Gravels and Bridge Pa Triangle sites have consistently shown the ability to produce concentrated, structured fruit even in years that test them.
From what is filtering through, 2025 looks to be a vintage of genuine promise for Syrah and Cabernet-dominant blends, with good phenolic ripeness and enough natural acidity to give the wines backbone. Most reds will reward patience — give them until at least 2027 or 2028 before you start pulling corks, and the better examples may well surprise you further down the road. We'll update our notes as more information comes in.
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Kumeu River
