Kumeu River, Rays Road Chardonnay, 2025
Kumeu River, Rays Road Chardonnay, 2025
- 75cl
- 13.5%
- White Still
- Chardonnay
Couldn't load pickup availability
Optimal drinking window: 2026 - 2040
Rays Road is Kumeu River's newest vineyard located in Hawke's Bay. Situated on a limestone hillside at 180 meters altitude with a northerly aspect, this site is dry-farmed to produce high-quality grapes for the Rays Road label under the Kumeu River name.
The Chardonnay is hand-harvested, whole-bunch pressed, and fermented with wild yeast in seasoned French oak barrels, resulting in a wine that is zesty and fragrant, with a mineral-driven complexity.
We think this is a superb entry into the Kumeu River range, and frankly an embarrassment to many Chardonnays twice the price.
What the critics say:
"Aromas of crushed stone and flint with subtle apple and transparency on the nose. Medium-bodied, with a solid core of fruit and a long, tangy finish. Vibrant and vivid chardonnay. Drink now. Screw cap."
"The 2025 Rays Road Chardonnay comes from the Hawke's Bay vineyard, and the nose leads with creamed cashew, white peach, citrus pith and salted caper brine. The palate is creamy and sleek, with bright acidity and talcy phenolics through the open-weave finish. There's a lot of unspent power here—it feels raw and unbridled somehow. This is impressive and quite different from the other cuvées, though it continues to bear the hallmarks of the Kumeu River house style. 13.5% alcohol, sealed under screw cap."
The Kumeu and Matua vineyards sit on heavy clay soils over a limestone subsoil base, which gives the wines their distinctive chalky minerality and structural backbone. The maritime influence from the Tasman Sea moderates temperatures, helping the fruit retain acidity through a long, relatively cool growing season. Rays Road is a declassified blend from across the estate's sites, so it captures the breadth of the Kumeu character rather than the precision of a single block. The result is consistently fresh and food-friendly, with a tension that clay-grown Chardonnay does particularly well.
Kumeu sits just west of Auckland in New Zealand's North Island, one of the country's oldest wine-producing areas though long overshadowed by Marlborough and Central Otago. It has no formal appellation in the European sense, but the Kumeu sub-regional identity has been built almost entirely on the back of the Brajkovich family's work over decades. The heavy clay soils and cool maritime climate here produce Chardonnay of a markedly different character to the fruit-forward styles of warmer New Zealand regions — tighter, more mineral, and built for the table rather than the glass on its own.
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.
OUR GROWERS
Kumeu River
Explore related wines
-
-
Speak to one of our Wine Gurus
Speak to a Wine GuruWith years of experience, our team can help you with all your wine buying and selling needs