2023 Heytesbury Chardonnay
Market price
Buying options
Tasting notes
Full bottle 1,337 g. Screwcap. Made from selected estate parcels of Gingin-clone Chardonnay. Whole-bunch pressed straight to barrel, unclarified. Spontaneous fermentation in barrels where the wine spent nine months followed by seven months on lees in tank. 2023 was a cool, late vintage. Characteristic smoky nose (a touch of warm, fresh pork crackling in there!). It’s a wine that leads with structure, unflinchingly conchoidal, as if it had been formed in the depths of the earth. Even the acidity feels lithographic, rock crystal-like in its transparency, but so fine it feels as if it might snap on your tongue. Flavour is interstitial, almost subliminal. When you reach for it, it’s like reaching for the dapples dancing between leaves, or a shaft of sun coming from an open door – your fingers fall through, touching nothing, but it’s still there. The wine tastes like light: so bright you’re squinting; salty like the lick of sun on skin; warm as summer; cold as the glitter of frost on a blue-sky winter day. And then the finish is like a long, long pause. Filled with the silence of thoughts. (TC)
Critic scores
Average Score
Jane Faulkner, Halliday Wine Companion
Huon Hooke, The Real Review
More reviews and scores
The 2023 Heytesbury Chardonnay reveals all the poise and balance we expect from the season. It is awesome. This feels totally weighted on the back palate. The fruit intensity, coupled with powerful acidity and phenolic presence, fully penetrates beyond mere "flavor experience" and dives deep into the senses; the only option left is to ride that wave until it slowly fades. It's a persistent, sophisticated wine of latent power and patience. While this is released two years from harvest, it doesn't start to show its complex potential until around five years from harvest and far beyond that. It's slow to emerge and slow to age. This is a 100% Gingin clone Chardonnay, matured in French oak barriques, 52% new, for nine months, with seven months blended in tank prior to bottling. 13% alcohol, sealed under screw cap. The 2023 Heytesbury Chardonnay hails from a pristine vintage in Margaret River. The season was on the cooler side of things but remained very dry and devoid of heat surges. Good weather at flowering meant yields were healthy, and from what I have seen so far, the season seems to have teased the very best from producers right across Western Australia, from all varieties. It truly was "one of those years."
2026 White Wine of the Year, Chardonnay of the Year. Score awarded by the Halliday tasting panel at the annual Awards judging. JF writes: When it comes to the best of the best, provenance is paramount. And taste memory utmost, especially when tasting Heytesbury made under Virginia Willcock’s tutelage (in ’26 she clocks up 20 years as chief winemaker at Vasse Felix, during which time she has transformed chardonnay in the region and beyond). Her influence is here in this wine, and ’23 will be known as one of the finest. It's hard to explain because it’s still very tightly wound, yet it has depth and volume. Oscillating between power and refinement, intensity and pure drinking pleasure. Grapefruit, Meyer lemon, a crushed oyster shell note, flinty, moreish sulphides, texture, mouth-watering, pure acidity and so much more besides. Nothing else to say other than that this is outstanding.
About the producer
Vasse Felix was the first winery in Margaret River, founded in 1967. Today, it is one of Western Australia’s – and the New World’s – most respected names, crafting outstanding, cool-climate Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon from this remote region, south of Perth.