Finesse and precision: the 2024 Savaterre Chardonnays
Of the 2024 vintage, Keppell Smith writes that "these are the years for finesse and precision." On the producer's granite slope at Beechworth, long warm days and cool nights allowed slow ripening across mature, close-planted vines carrying small crops, the conditions Smith looks for and rarely gets. The wines have arrived to match the framing. Jeni Port (Halliday Wine Companion) and Huon Hooke (The Real Review) have both rated the estate Chardonnay 97 points; Gary Walsh (The Wine Front) has it at 96+. The Frère Cadet, made identically from a vineyard a few kilometres away, sits at 95/95 from Port and Walsh, the strongest critical showing the junior bottling has had.
The Beechworth season was unusual in the way it set up rather than how it finished. Good winter and spring rainfall filled the dams; a cool, wet start to summer kept the canopies clean and the fruit unhurried. The rain stopped in early February and the weather turned dry and warm without heatwaves. Halliday's regional summary calls 2024 Beechworth "very high" quality, with chardonnay and pinot noir among the standouts. At Savaterre's elevation of 440 metres, the slow ripening Smith says these vines do best in arrived intact, and without the early-spring frost that hit some lower-lying sites.
The scores read as confirmation rather than breakthrough. Hooke has rated the last two Savaterre Chardonnays 98 points each, so 97 here is the address's top tier rather than a peak. Port's 97, on the other hand, matches her highest score for the estate wine; Walsh's 96+ is a half-step up on his note for the 2023. What stands out is Walsh's framing of the 2024 as "a richer iteration of Savaterre Chardonnay with not much in the way of struck match," a small but real shift from the polarising reductive style of recent vintages towards something more open in its youth. Port's note runs along similar lines: "the art of the winemaker laid bare ... plush in fruit and fine in structure, citrusy fresh and oak defined, savoury influenced and varietally pure" (97 points, Jeni Port, Halliday Wine Companion).
Smith planted Savaterre in 1997 on a south-facing granite slope opposite Giaconda, after several years searching for a site with the right altitude, soils and diurnal range. The training that mattered came at Bass Phillip with Phillip Jones and at Domaine Henri Gouges in Burgundy, both apprenticeships visible in the finished wines: indigenous yeasts, natural malo, no fining or filtration, long élevage in high-quality French oak. The vineyard is close-planted at roughly 8,000 vines per hectare and farmed organically. Crops are small by design, and the wines go to bottle when Smith decides they're ready rather than to a release schedule.
The Frère Cadet is made in the same cellar, on the same élevage, from a vineyard run by other growers a few kilometres from the estate. Walsh's note on the 2024 is worth taking at face value: "Quite the track record for this producer over the years ... I'm a younger brother, and younger brothers are most often superior" (95 points, Gary Walsh, The Wine Front). At $80, the Frère Cadet is the address at its most approachable, and on the evidence of this release, closer to the estate wine than usual.
