Wine of the week: a sensational Aussie chardonnay

published 4 October 2019

2018 Payten & Jones, Valley Vignerons chardonnay, Yarra Valley, Victoria, Australia

About £23.75, London Wine Shippers, 020-7622 3000;Bottle Apostle, 020-8347 7577; Ex Cellar, 01372-461187

I steamed around a huge Aussie tasting the other day and loved revisiting a large number of my 100 Best Australian Wines from this year's report in the same room at the same time. I kicked off my nationwide roadshow a few weekends ago at the Tate Britain with a huge tasting and dinner, celebrating wines from this year's report and also pulling older 100 Best beauties out of the cellar.

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I am always on high alert for Australian wines that are of 100 Best quality and, by chance, Troy Jones from Payten & Jones flew over from Barcelona where he is working on a top-secret Priorat project, to just join us for dinner and have a yarn. This prompted me to remember his epic VV chardonnay, which I had tasted only days earlier. Australia really is making the most remarkable and evocative chardonnays in the world right now.

For the price of a dodgy bottle of Chablis you can drink this sensational, pristine, pin-point accurate beauty, and it shines a light on not only its region the Yarra Valley, which is home to oceans of delicious chardonnay but also on its maker. Jones makes a wickedly naughty syrah, called Major Kong, which challenges every fibre of your being with its irreverence and attitude, but he can also turn his hand to a languid, shimmering, mountain-lake-cool wine like my featured chardonnay.

Matthew Jukes is a winner of the International Wine & Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year (matthewjukes.com)

Matthew Jukes has worked in the UK wine business for well over three decades and during this time has written 14 wine books.

Matthew regularly lectures, judges, speaks at wine conferences and runs masterclass tastings for both corporate and private clients all over the world. Matthew is also the creator of his ground-breaking initiative, the One Day Wine School, an indulgent day of tasting and learning first performed in 2006.

He has been the MoneyWeek wine correspondent since 2006 and has written a weekly column for the Daily Mail’s Weekend Magazine since 1999. His four highly-acclaimed, annual wine reports – the Burgundy En Primeur Report, the Bordeaux En Primeur Report, the Piemonte Report and the 100 Best Australian Wines – are published on his website, www.matthewjukes.com.

Matthew is one of the world’s leading experts on Australian wine and, with Brisbane-based wine writer Tyson Stelzer, runs an annual competition in Australia to find ‘The Great Australian Red’. He was made Honorary Australian of the Year in the UK at the 2012 Australia Day Foundation Gala dinner.

Matthew is a winner of the International Wine and Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year Trophy. His thoughts, recommendations and tastings notes are followed very closely by the wine world at large.