Erin Larkin - Wine Advocate 2024 Single Vineyard Scores

We were delighted to host Erin Larkin of The Wine Advocate on her recent trip to New Zealand.Erin missed out on joining us for our Kumeu Restrospective tastings, so we went into the family cellar once more, tasting through 32 vintages (some up to 21 years old) in what Erin described as a “monumental” tasting. Read her full article below:New Zealand: South Island Trip During Vintage 2025 New Zealand is best known globally for its Sauvignon Blancs from Marlborough, a cool, coastal, mountainous region on the northern tip of the South Island. In fact, the wines made in Marlborough account for almost 70% of the entire...

To cap off the celebrations of our 80th Anniversary here in Kumeu we hosted a retrospective Kumeu River Chardonnay tasting at the winery.  We welcomed writers, restaurateurs, and close friends from the trade in New Zealand and Australia to share some of our favourite and most celebrated vintages.The Retrospective Tasting provided an exceptional opportunity to demonstrate our wines' quality and remarkable aging potential and reinforced our pioneering decision to convert to screwcap in 2001.Throughout the tasting, we celebrated a few great vintages and milestones, including Nigel Tibbets' 50th year at Kumeu River, and to top it off, the tasting was hosted on what...

Recently whilst in London, Paul had the opportunity to share our 2023 single vineyard Chardonnays with Jancis Robinson, MW. 2023 marks Kumeu Rivers 80th Anniversary and to mark the occasions, Paul hosted a rare tasting event at Farr Vintners in London, with an opportunity to experience some of our finest vintages of Chardonnay back as far as 2002.  "This retrospective tasting of a further 30 wines demonstrated the extraordinary consistency and ageability of Kumeu River Chardonnays. What was also clear was that, a bit like that other famed Chardonnay exponent Domaine Jean-François Coche-Dury, the quality gap between their most basic wine (Kumeu River Village...