2019 Leeuwin Estate Chardonnay Art Series Margaret River 750 ml

Critics and wine lovers have been calling Leeuwin Estate’s Art Series Chardonnay “world class” for years now. 

Beyond the blue-chip Chardonnays of Burgundy—wines like Comtes Lafon, Leflaive, and Romanée-Conti—one Chardonnay is a mainstay among the world’s best: Leeuwin Estate Art Series from Margaret River in Western Australia. The 2019 vintage earned three stunning 98-point scores, from Wine Advocate, Decanter, and Australian expert James Halliday’s Wine Companion.

Located a stone’s throw from the Indian Ocean in one of the most remote wine regions in the world, Leeuwin Estate has been setting Australia’s white-wine standard for decades. To grasp its importance, consider that Decanter recently staged a retrospective tasting of three decades of this “true classic among Australian Chardonnays.” Moreover, Australia’s prestigious Langton’s auction house named the Art Series one of their “Heritage Five,” making it the only white to stand with wines like Penfolds Grange and Henschke’s Hill of Grace.

To many, this comes as no surprise because everything that Leeuwin does is geared toward maximizing quality, including keeping yields to a minimum so that small bunches retain tremendously concentrated fruit, and the care that Leeuwin applies to the grapes is in their motto: “Treat ‘em like eggs.”  

In the 2019 vintage, that devotion to quality resulted in a historic Art Series Chardonnay: a triple-98-point classic that Decanter praised as “gloriously perfumed, pure and precise.” Wine Advocate called it “stupendously good,” and Halliday’s Wine Companion said it “glitters with a purity and finesse that is deeply attractive.”
 

And it’s only poised to improve: Halliday once noted that older vintages of the Art Series can be “reminiscent of top Meursault.” Praise for Chardonnay doesn’t get any higher than that.