• French oak
• White peach & grilled pineapple
• Crème brûlée & vanilla
• Roasted cashew

"Fine creamy and fruit centric, a harmonious bouquet of fresh cream and vanilla, a finer gunflint moment showing off the mineral side of the wine, white smoke and tense toasty barrel moments. Dry, weighty, tense and alluring. Great texture with a core of fruit. Very youthful too with lots of acidity. A mix of fruit flavours with stone fruits and tree fruits, citrus with a whisper" Cameron Douglas, Master Sommelier, Feb 2021

"One of the best examples of Elston that I can recall tasting. Crisp, dry chardonnay with reduced malolactic fermentation. An elegant wine with a mineral thread and grapefruit, lemon curd, hazelnut and baguette crust flavours" Bob Campbell MW, The Real Review, Mar 2021

"This is splendidly styled and composed, showing white fleshy peach, lemon peel, nougat and roasted cashew notes on the nose, followed by a finely styled palate delivering creamy mouthfeel and silky flow. It’s beautifully poised and harmonious with elegant complexity, making it immensely captivating and attractive. At its best: 2022 to 2032" Sam Kim, Wine Orbit, Feb 2021

"This refined wine was grown on the hillsides above the winery at Havelock North, in the Bridge Pa Triangle and at Dartmoor. Weighty, with a fragrant, complex bouquet, it has deep, peachy, citrusy flavours gently seasoned with oak and a savoury, finely poised finish" Michael Cooper, NZ Listener, Feb 2021

A brilliant white-gold in the glass, Elston Chardonnay ’19 has the immediate aroma of fresh golden nectarines, passionfruit and grilled pineapple. Lush, ripe acid drives the wine’s length and balance, bringing the mouthfeel from ripe sweet lemon and white peach, to crème brûlée, roasted cashew, popcorn, to mineral tones and flint. As complex fruit becomes savoury in the long finish, the liveliness of Elston Chardonnay ’19 gives way to elegance. This is truly an Elston for the ages.

Elston ’19 is bottled with leading technology ‘DIAM’ corks. These are produced using a liquid form of carbon dioxide which eliminates any possibility of cork taint and, when the wine is well cellared, they provide consistent evolution for every bottle. Elston ’19 will continue to evolve in bottle for five years from harvest.

The superb quality of the 2019 vintage was immediately apparent in the fully ripe grapes that were hand-harvested from their separate, individual plots within Te Mata Estate’s vineyards between 18 and 22 March 2019.

Each parcel was gently whole-cluster pressed, cold settled and racked to new and seasoned French oak barrels for fermentation. The resulting wines remained in contact with their yeast lees with a number going through malolactic fermentation. The finest lots were selected for further maturation, spending a total of 10 months in barrel.

Elston is named for Elston Hall in Nottinghamshire, the ancestral home of Charles Darwin’s family. Darwin’s ‘theory of natural selection’ forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory, the foundation of biology. The wyvern symbol of Elston Hall appears on the label.