2025 Wine of the Year
Oakridge 864 Drive Block Funder & Diamond Vineyard Chardonnay 2022 – Yarra Valley, Victoria
98 points | Price when tasted $96
Oakridge 864 Drive Block Funder & Diamond Vineyard Chardonnay 2022 has been named the 2025 Halliday Wine of the Year.
You have to win your varietal category to qualify for our Wine of the Year, naturally, and this year our overall winner came from the Chardonnay of the Year tasting. We didn’t know this at the time, of course. The chardonnays were poured, we opened our notebooks and/or laptops, wine by wine, we tasted. The room went quiet. There’s no discussion among tasters while the tasting is performed; the only sounds are the shuffle of chairs, the tap of keyboards, the scrape of glassware.
There were 11 wines in this chardonnay judging. These had been whittled down from the almost 1000 single-varietal chardonnays entered. No wine makes it to this stage of the judging process without being good, if not blisteringly so. We each finished tasting. We each cast and logged our votes. Discussion began, and the view was unanimous: this was one incredibly difficult field to split. Every wine was excellent and then some. The assumption was, therefore, that the votes would be scattered. There are nine tasters on the panel. It would have been both plausible and fitting if we’d all voted for a different wine as our top preferred.
From the Smart vineyard – a Grand Cru of the Vale – with the great Bernard Smart (vale) immortalised on the front label. Fermented as whole bunches in a concrete pyramid, then matured in hogsheads, with 20% new oak. Such a delightfully pale-hued, fragrantly savoury and finely structured suite this year. A red aperitivo thread builds through the sour cherry, tart redcurrant, pomegranate and dried cranberry notes, with bitter orange, coriander seed, cardamom, white pepper, cinchona bark, cinnamon and bitter alpine herbs. There’s such engaging transparency to this, such serene refinement, such poise. It’s a wine of incredible depth and weightlessness, suspended over a tannic net of such intricacy. It's as good an iteration as I can recall tasting on release. A great wine. – Marcus Ellis
And yet. When the ‘scores’ went up on the board, and it became obvious that almost everyone had opted for the same wine, it was one of those moments when you could feel yourself taking an involuntary deep breath. One person mentioned that a tingle had gone down their spine. It was an electrifying wine moment, provoked by a wine that is completely out of the box. It is the Oakridge 864 Single Block Release Drive Block Funder & Diamond Vineyard Chardonnay 2022. It is crazily good.
The Chardonnay of the Year category is the toughest category to win; we’ve reached that point in Australia where top producer after top producer is both nailing the variety and managing all the right trimmings. Once this Oakridge 864 Chardonnay had won the toughest category in such an emphatic way, it was essentially inevitable that it would go on to win White Wine of the Year. It did that, and then came out on top in our overall Wine of the Year taste-off as well. It’s quite a feat but then, Oakridge’s 864 Chardonnay 2022 is one amazingly good wine. – Campbell Mattinson
Crushes of chardonnay have surpassed shiraz for the first time in a decade, and, making Halliday Wine Companion history, a chardonnay has won Wine of the Year.
“Chardonnay is the big dog now,” says Dave Bicknell, chief winemaker at Oakridge and creator of the 864 Single Block Release Drive Block Funder & Diamond Vineyard Chardonnay. “It’s been killing it across the country for 10, 15 years, but we keep getting politicked-out by red wines and fashion. It’s nice that chardonnay gets a run for a change.”
Dave says the Funder & Diamond vineyard is aptly named. “The vineyard's like a diamond, and the winemaking process is just the art of cutting and polishing.”
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Previous Wine of the Year recipients were Bass Phillip Reserve Pinot Noir 2010 (2014), Xanadu Stevens Road Cabernet Sauvignon 2011 (2015), Serrat Shiraz Viognier 2014 (2016), Best’s Thomson Family Shiraz 2014 (2017), Henschke Hill of Grace 2012 (2018), Duke’s Vineyard Magpie Hill Reserve Riesling 2017 (2019), Yangarra Estate Vineyard High Sands McLaren Vale Grenache 2016 (2020), Brokenwood Graveyard Vineyard Hunter Valley Shiraz 2018 (2021), Yarra Yering Dry Red No. 1 2019 (2022), Best’s Wines Foudre Ferment Riesling 2021 (2023) Yangarra Estate Vineyard Old Vine Grenache 2021 (2024) and Oakridge 864 Drive Block Funder & Diamond Vineyard Chardonnay 2022 (2025).
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This is an edited extract from the 2026 Halliday Wine Companion, with reviews by Dave Brookes, Jane Faulkner, Jeni Port, Katrina Butler, Marcus Ellis, Mike Bennie, Philip Rich, Shanteh Wale and Toni Paterson MW.
