Yarra Valley-produced wines once again proved their quality in a national wine show.
Chandon Australia and Giant Steps Wine brought gold medals back home, respectively, to the Yarra Valley from the 2025 Sydney Royal Wine Show.
The Sydney Royal Wine Show is judged by an independent panel, chosen for their expertise within their industry, who assess products through a blind tasting.
To achieve gold medal status, a wine must score 95 points or over and be considered ‘outstanding’.
Gold medal products within each category are then reassessed in a blind tasting by an expanded panel of judges to determine the champion trophy and prize winners.
Chandon Australia’s 2018 Chandon Vintage Brut was scored 95 points, claiming a gold in the white and rose sparkling wine, classic varieties and blends, bottle-fermented, 30 months or more tirage age category.
Chandon Australia viticulture and winemaking director Dan Buckle said the Chandon Australia team were delighted with a great result.
“We’re thrilled for a couple of reasons. I’ve been involved in the Sydney Royal Wine Show over the years. I’ve even judged there a while ago. And it is one of Australia’s preeminent wine shows, and they have a really great panel of judges and a really well respected show, so it’s a really great result to be up there,” he said.
“And the other reason I’m really happy is the other wines that were very close to us, we see them as some of Australia’s greatest sparkling wines, they’re strong competitors, and it’s nice to be in a field of really strong wines like that.”
The director explained Vintage Brut is a wine at the core of Chandon Australia’s winemaking.
“Vintage Brut is a wine that’s very close to our heart here in Chandon Australia. It’s something that we’ve made almost every year since the beginning in the 1980s,” Mr Buckle said.
“It’s a blend of chardonnay and pinot noir with a little bit of the other traditional variety, pinot meunier. It has flavours that come from chardonnay, if you think of citrus, lime and green apple, and then flavours that come from pinot noir, like strawberry and white peach as a blend, as a composition of grape varieties and different batches of wines, that’s something we look for, which is a complexity of fruit flavour and overall harmony.
“We think it’s got a lot of really lovely flavours and a really nice bubble in the mouth. So when you taste the wine, it has a sort of finesse and softness to it that makes it really delicious.”
The same wine could taste different depending on its vintage, despite being made from grapes harvested in the same vineyard.
Mr Buckle said each vintage has its own unique character.
“Primarily, the season the grapes grow in, from November through till harvest time in March and April, has a huge influence on the flavour that the grapes have, and therefore the flavour that the wine ends up with,” he said.
“Each season has its unique weather patterns, whether that’s sunshine, heat, rain or wind, and whilst as winemakers and using fruit from similar vineyards gives us a certain degree of consistency, it’s always the weather that’s unpredictable.
“2018 was a good year, a little bit warmer, not as warm as 2016 was, but not as cool as 2017. And so it has a really nice sense of sunshine. The grapes were ripe. The weather was terrific, and the blend came together really well.”
This year, the Sydney Royal Wine Show saw over 1500 wines assessed, with 103 gold medals awarded across five states and 23 wine regions, highlighting the exceptional calibre of wine being produced nationwide.
When asked about the secret to producing good quality wines, the Chandon Australia’s viticulture and winemaking director pointed out “attention to detail at every level”.
“It’s a big team effort, whether it’s with the guys who are just finishing pruning the vineyards now, the teams in the vineyard over summer, or the guys in the winery making the wines, or the guys in a production area who finished the bottling and final steps of packaging,” Mr Buckle said.
“Every part of what we do is that we try to do it to the highest standard, and I think that sort of vibrant ripples through the whole of our winery, and it ends up something you can taste and feel when you hold a bottle of our wines.”
Giant Steps Wine’s 2024 Sexton Vineyard Chardonnay also won a gold medal in the Chardonnay 2025 and 2024 category.
Giant Steps Wine was contacted.
