Smith & Sheth Heretaunga Chardonnay 2024
£23.75
The wine
Vibrant lemon, oat biscuit and white peach on the nose, lifted by a beautiful twist of creaminess. The palate opens tense and saline with lemon zest, then fills out through warm grilled peach, roasted cashew and well-judged French oak, closing long and savoury.
Heretaunga is the Māori name for the Hawke’s Bay plains, and the fruit is drawn from three parts of it: Bridge Pa, Omahu in the Gimblett Gravels, and Mangatahi, where the Mendoza clone sits on stony silt loam over alluvial red metals. Every parcel is hand leaf-plucked to open the fruit zone to the morning sun and picked entirely by hand. The wine was whole-bunch pressed and fermented on indigenous yeasts in French barriques and puncheons, 53 per cent of them new, with 60 per cent taken through malolactic conversion. Eleven months in barrel, then a further six on lees in tank before bottling.
The producer
Smith & Sheth
View all Smith & Sheth winesSmith & Sheth is a Hawke’s Bay project with an unusual pairing behind it. Steve Smith is one of a small number of New Zealanders to hold a Master of Wine, and spent two decades building Craggy Range before leaving to start again. Brian Sheth is an American investor with a conservation background. They joined forces in 2017, first taking on Pyramid Valley in North Canterbury, then establishing this label in the Hawke’s Bay, where Smith had spent most of his working life and knew precisely which parcels he wanted.
The name Heretaunga is the Māori name for the Hawke’s Bay plains, and it is the appellation the wines are built around: the river terraces and gravel beds inland of Napier and Hastings, taking in Bridge Pa, Omahu and Mangatahi. The climate is warm and dry with long, hot summers and a drawn-out autumn, which suits Chardonnay and Syrah in particular. Farming is certified under New Zealand’s Sustainable Winegrowing programme with a nil-residue spray regime, fruit is picked entirely by hand, and the winemaking runs on indigenous yeasts.
