Meet the 2025 Family Collection Chardonnay

Good seasons make great wine. And 2025 was a very good season.

There's a particular satisfaction that comes from releasing a wine you've watched grow from bud to bottle - one that surprised you in all the right ways. The 2025 Family Collection Chardonnay is that wine for us.

It starts in the vineyard, as it always does. A dry winter gave the vines exactly the rest they needed. A cool spring arrived right on time for flowering, setting up canopies that were healthy, plush, and balanced. Then the growing season warmed steadily, the way you hope it will - building flavour slowly, without stress - before finishing hot and fast to lock in that brightness and concentration we were after. We managed irrigation carefully throughout. The fruit came in early morning, when the air was still cool and the grapes were holding everything we wanted them to hold.

In the winery, we kept our hands relatively light. Estate grown fruit, fermented in oak, then left to rest on lees for eight months in French oak before careful blending. That time on lees is where the texture comes from - that mid-palate weight that makes a Chardonnay feel generous without being heavy.

What's in the glass

Lift the glass and you'll find baked cinnamon pears sitting alongside clean, bright citrus - there's energy there, even in the aromatics. On the palate, it's all lemon-vanilla shortbread at first, that classic Great Southern Chardonnay richness, before giving way to a matchstick and flint finish that keeps things honest. It's a wine that's generous and precise at the same time, which is exactly what we set out to make.

How to drink it

We think about food when we make wine, and the 2025 Chardonnay was made with a few specific moments in mind.

Fresh caught marron drizzled in a butter garlic jus — the obvious pairing, and an obvious one for a reason. The richness of brown butter and the sweetness of the marron flesh are made for this wine.

Afternoon drinks in the sun with your colleagues, a cold glass and good company, nothing more required.

Those first days of warmth after a long winter, when the sun is shining and the air is still crisp. The kind of afternoon where you notice the shift in the season and want to mark it somehow.

Or paired with a home cooked ravioli and mushroom ragù — earthy, buttery, deeply satisfying.

The details

The 2025 Family Collection Chardonnay is available now at $32.00, with pickup available at our Albany Cellar Door.

If you're a Gathered + Grateful subscriber, you can pre-order yours through your subscription at up to 25% off. Not a member yet? Learn more here - https://www.alkoomiwines.com.au/pages/gathered-grateful-wine-club

Alkoomi Wines, Mount Barker, Great Southern, Western Australia.