2024 Bannockburn Winery Block Chardonnay

Bannockburn Vineyards was founded in 1974 by Stuart Hooper, who envisioned producing Australian wines to rival the world’s best. Situated in the Moorabool Valley near Geelong, the estate spans 26 vineyard blocks across diverse soils of volcanic debris, ancient seabeds, and limestone. Now among the oldest plantings in the region, Bannockburn is celebrated for its close-planted Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and other varieties, grown with organic principles and crafted with minimal intervention to reflect purity of site. Remaining family-owned, the estate continues to balance heritage, sustainability, and innovation, producing wines of depth, character, and enduring quality.

The 2024 Winery Block Chardonnay is drawn from Bannockburn’s largest single vineyard, a 5.3-acre site planted in 1981 to the P58 clone. While typically an early ripener, harvest is carefully staged over several days to capture the block’s subtle variations in soil—ranging from dark brown clay to sandier topsoils over basalt and limestone.
Hand-picked fruit was whole-bunch pressed, settled overnight, and fermented with wild yeasts in French oak hogsheads, around 40% new. Natural malolactic fermentation completed in spring, with the wine resting on lees, unstirred, for 10 months before blending and bottling. The result is a Chardonnay of power and poise, balancing layered fruit richness with mineral detail and finely woven oak.
Alc. 13.5%

Other Reviews....
The Winery Block has been the bedrock of Bannockburn Chardonnay over the years. It was planted in 1981, and is the largest planting of chardonnay on the estate.
This is stellar. It’s a wine of both power and length and with a bit of extra character as well. Apples, peaches, slips of pear skin and nuts, perhaps some stonefruit pips as well, or certainly something that seems both fruity and woody at once. It’s not reticent or restrained but nor is it exaggerated; it’s alive with flavour, fit and firing you could say, ripped with muscle and energy. Touch and go for 96. In any case it’s superb. Drink 2026 - 2034.
95 Points
Campbell Mattinson - The Wine Front