2014 Dog Point Vineyard Chardonnay Marlborough New Zealand 750 ml

One of James Suckling’s top ten New Zealand Chardonnays of the 2014 vintage, this Dog Point Chardonnay enthralls with Burgundian finesse and stone fruit purity—and a stop-in-your-tracks price. 

Wine Spectator flat out calls it “one of the best examples of Chardonnay from Zealand” while Jeb Dunnuck’s 95-point paean names it “sensational” and “incredibly refined,” advising readers: “Don’t miss this beauty.” A mountain of praise, and yet this pedigreed Kiwi stunner, melding lemon zest vibrancy with hazelnut and baking spice richness, will ding your wallet for just $30 a bottle.

It’s been many years since we made our first buying trip to the windy, sun-streaked islands of New Zealand. We’ve walked across enough gorgeous terrain and visited so many Marlborough and Central Otago cellars that our “o” started sounding like “oi.” With each successive visit we’ve come away with a bounty of terrifically stylish Sauvignon Blancs and high-toned, intensely fruit-forward Pinot Noirs. But one prize had always eluded us: Dog Point’s best-in-class Chardonnay, a low-yield, pale-gold treasure that there never seems to be enough of. 

The family-owned Dog Point Vineyard, one of the country’s top wineries, occupies a magical patch of land near the convergence of the Brancott and Omaka Valleys at the northeastern tip of the South Island. Dog Point’s vineyards were among the very first planted in the area back in the 1970s, and feature some of the oldest vines in the mountain-crowned Marlborough region.

The vines here aren’t the only things that have gotten better with age: Dog Point is brilliantly run by two of the savviest old-school winemakers on the island: viticulturist Ivan Sutherland and enologist James Healy. The men first met at Cloudy Bay Vineyards, where they, over the course of two decades, helped engineer New Zealand’s stunning ascent on the global stage, transforming Cloudy Bay into perhaps the best-known New Zealand winery in the world.

In 2003, the duo broke off and formed the Dog Point label, returning to the vines that Sutherland himself had helped plant over 30 years before. Both men were intimately familiar with the vineyards: They knew the free-draining silty loam of the flats would make for superb Chardonnay, and that the clay loam of Dog Point’s gentle hillsides, carved thousands of years ago by glaciers, were perfect for the cool-climate Pinot grape—making them adept challengers to Burgundy. They knew about the area’s abundant light (2,200 hours of sunshine a year), and the brisk ocean breezes and maritime climate, which provide an elongated season and result in massive ripeness and extraordinary phenolic maturity.

Those conditions, coupled with New Zealand’s abrupt diurnal temperature shifts, help explain the vibrancy and precision of the 2014 Dog Point Chardonnay. Dog Point’s rigorous emphasis on low-cropping gave them an edge on the opulent bumper harvest of 2014, whose early start and dryness aided them in crafting one of the more extraordinary and critically acclaimed Chardonnays to come out of New Zealand in some time. Hand-picked grapes, 100% wild yeasts, and French oak fermenting make this a truly worthy contender with white Burgundy—at just $30 per bottle.