Kumeu River, Maté's Vineyard Chardonnay, 2025
Kumeu River, Maté's Vineyard Chardonnay, 2025
- 75cl
- 14%
- White Still
- Chardonnay
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Drinking window: 2026 - 2045
Kumeu River's Maté's Vineyard is New Zealand's most celebrated single-vineyard Chardonnay, and one of the few wines from the Southern Hemisphere that serious Burgundy lovers genuinely lose sleep over.
Named after the late Maté Brajkovich, the patriarch who planted the vines, this is a wine rooted in family, in place, and in an almost defiant belief that Auckland's west can produce world-class Chardonnay when nobody expected it to. The 2025 vintage arrives from a growing season with good warm spells and well-timed rainfall, and the wine has the precision and energy to match.
What the critics say:
"Very aromatic with sliced lime, pear skin, chardonnay skin, white pepper and lilacs that follow through to a medium- to full-bodied wine with density in the center palate and a long finish of sliced apple and pear, salt and light nuts. Lightly flinty at the end. It is very open already but subtle. Drink now. Screw cap."
"The 2025 Maté's Vineyard Chardonnay is powerful and nutty, with ripe orchard fruit. There are also notes of white pepper, pressed linen, green apple, chamomile and salted cashews. The palate is predictably powerful and unbelievably concentrated, with depth and length that feels interminable. This is an exceptional release of Maté's, one you should make every effort to taste. These wines age so well; don't acquire them with the expectation that they must be consumed soon. They have a decades-long future ahead, if only you have the patience. 13.7% alcohol, sealed under screw cap."
Maté's Vineyard sits on heavy clay soils over a base of compacted clay and silt, which retain water well and impose a natural stress on the vines that concentrates the fruit. The climate around Kumeu is warmer and more humid than you might expect for fine Chardonnay — this is greater Auckland, not Marlborough — but the maritime influence from the Tasman Sea moderates temperatures and preserves the acidity that makes these wines sing. Vine age is a crucial factor here too: old vines, low yields, and the cool west-facing aspect of the vineyard all contribute to the wine's remarkable focus.
Kumeu is a sub-region within the broader Auckland wine region, and it sits well outside the New Zealand appellation system's most fashionable postcodes. There are no strict appellation rules governing style or yield in the same way as, say, Burgundy's AOC hierarchy, but Kumeu River's insistence on single-vineyard bottlings has effectively created its own informal cru system. The region is warm and wet by New Zealand standards, which makes viticulture demanding — but it also means the wines have a richness and texture that cooler South Island regions rarely produce.
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
