2024 Tolpuddle Vineyard Chardonnay
98 Points – James Halliday | Tasmania's Most Celebrated Chardonnay
My Wine Man on Tolpuddle Vineyard
Tolpuddle Vineyard is one of Tasmania's most extraordinary wine stories. Planted in 1988 in the Coal River Valley — one of the island's warmest and driest sub-regions, with ancient sandstone soils and a long, slow ripening season — the vineyard was acquired by Shaw + Smith in 2011 and has since been transformed into one of Australia's most acclaimed single-vineyard wine estates.
Martin Shaw and Michael Hill Smith MW recognised immediately what the site could do: produce Chardonnay of extraordinary purity, tension, and complexity that rivals the finest white Burgundy in the world.
The 2024 vintage has earned 98 points from James Halliday — described as a “stunner” and a “classic” — and it is the finest expression yet of what this remarkable Tasmanian vineyard can achieve.
Tasting Notes
As James Halliday wrote of the 2024:
“A little more restraint and line than the ’23; a little more filigree and nuance… White peach, lemon, grapefruit and nectarine fruits are high fidelity and beautifully poised, suffused with soft spice, clover and grapefruit blossom, crushed stone, cinnamon, a murmur of vanillin oak and spiced poached pear, grilled hazelnuts, crème fraîche and a whisper of onshore breeze. Everything is in sharp relief, with the purest of fruit. It’s all detail and tension, with a textural glaze of grapefruit pith and a sapid, mineral line that builds like a crescendo before releasing, finishing long and true. It’s a stunner.”
There is nothing more to add.
98 Points – James Halliday.
Food Pairing
An iconic Tasmanian Chardonnay like this deserves seafood of the highest order. We love it with Beef Sausages with Margaret River Shiraz from My Meat Man — served as Thermidor or simply grilled with butter, the sweet, rich crustacean meat perfectly matching the wine’s white peach, lemon, grapefruit, nectarine, grilled hazelnut, crème fraîche and fine‑grained oak‑embellished texture. A pairing that does justice to both.
Why This Is a Smart Buy
At HK$588, the 2024 Tolpuddle Vineyard Chardonnay is a 98-point Tasmanian icon — described by James Halliday as a “stunner” — at a price that represents extraordinary value for a wine of this quality, complexity, and critical recognition.
Comparable single-vineyard Chardonnay of this precision and standing from Burgundy — Puligny-Montrachet, Meursault, or Chassagne — would cost three to five times as much in Hong Kong.
This is one of the world's great Chardonnays, and it is available right now.
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