Giant Steps Bastard Hill Chardonnay 2023

98 POINTS

Philip Rich - Halliday Wine Companion

Planted in 1987 in Gladysdale at 400m by the trailblazing Ray Guerin for Hardys and purchased by Giant Steps in 2022. This is its first wine from the vineyard. And what a wine it is! A brilliant and pure scented bouquet of nashi, pink grapefruit, crushed rock, sea spray and honeysuckle. There's a hint of fresh honeycomb, too. Incisive, pure and chalky on the palate, this concentrated yet light on its feet wine is reminiscent of good Corton-Charlemagne. That it will age gracefully is a given.

96 POINTS

James Suckling

Complex aromas of lemon peel, gun smoke, orange blossoms and sea spray. The palate is medium-bodied with a creamy texture cut through with tightly wound acidity, giving notes of candied lime zest, mandarin peel and steely minerality. Very refined and pure with an underlying tension. The premiere release of this vineyard to Giant Steps.

96 POINTS

David Sly - Decanter

This wine is shaped very differently from its predecessors in this vineyard – most notably Eileen Hardy Chardonnay – even though it still features only I10V1 clone fruit. The difference is due to an open-hearted winemaking approach from Melanie Chester, allowing rich fruit notes to relax in a luscious mouthfeel. A quarter of the grapes go through malolactic fermentation to soften any austerity from a powerful acid seam running through the palate. This highly impressive result comes before any significant vineyard improvements by the Giant Steps team at Bastard Hill have taken effect, proving that this single site wine will generate even greater excitement into the future.

96 POINTS

Campbell Mattinson - The Wine Front

The addition of this new wine to the Giant Steps single vineyard range is a bit exciting. Or for me it is, because I’ve loved some wines from this vineyard in the past – when I’ve seen them, under the Yarra Burn/Hardy’s label – and because this vineyard has always been talked about in such revered terms. Indeed every now and then I hear someone say: whatever happened to that fabled Bastard Hill vineyard? If you’re interested, I wrote some words on this vineyard on the other site – here. Now that Giant Steps owns this vineyard it will get, you’d reckon, the love and attention it deserves. The other reason I’m excited about the addition of this vineyard to the Giant Steps range is that I tasted this chardonnay, blind, in a tasting earlier this year, and loved it. i.e. I love what this wine shows in the glass. All the Giant Steps single vineyard wines will be released on August 21. I’ll run through the remainder of them all prior to that date. I just wanted to jump on this Bastard Hill Chardonnay 2023. It’s intense, it’s bony, and it’s long. It’s very Upper Yarra. It showed a bit of cedarwood oak when I first opened it, as in a bit too much, but once it had been allowed to breathe it seemed precisely in balance. This wine tastes of grapefruit and chalk, lemon and pear, with musk and sea-spray characters driven within. It has genuine, penetrative momentum, tempered by a gentle, textural creaminess. Flint is not part of the Giant Steps style but there’s a smidgen of it here, just enough to complex. This chardonnay is nothing if not a wine for the cellar. It doesn’t want you to flirt with it; it wants you to invest.

96 POINTS

Campbell Mattinson - The Wine Front

It’s intense, it’s bony, and it’s long. It’s very Upper Yarra. It showed a bit of cedarwood oak when I first opened it, as in a bit too much, but once it had been allowed to breathe it seemed precisely in balance. This wine tastes of grapefruit and chalk, lemon and pear, with musk and sea-spray characters driven within. It has genuine, penetrative momentum, tempered by a gentle, textural creaminess. Flint is not part of the Giant Steps style but there’s a smidgen of it here, just enough to complex. This chardonnay is nothing if not a wine for the cellar. It doesn’t want you to flirt with it; it wants you to invest.

91 POINTS

Angus Hughson - Vinous

The inaugural 2023 Chardonnay Bastard Hill, from near the top of the Yarra Valley and a cold vintage, is unsurprisingly energetic and tightly wound, with a fine core of citrus and grassy or hay tones. Firm, edgy acidity is in the driving seat, with citrus flavors a little underpowered. A little skinny right now, so it needs more time to come together.