Wine: Taste by the bucketful

By Yvonne Lorkin for Canvas magazine

Lionel Richie once sang "You're once, twice; three times a chardonnay ... and I luuuuuurve you". In my happy place they're the right lyrics okay ...

Domaine Bernard Defaix Cuvee Vielle Vigne Chablis 2014 $53

Get ready, get set and go to a happy place of intense lemony, chalky notes that sit up and shout "Oi! I'm a chablis!" Made from clean, concentrated chardonnay fruit, the result of 100 per cent tank fermentation is a wine bursting with buckets of smashed quartz, grapefruit pith and minerality to burn. Punchy, peach-driven and deliciously structured, it's fresh and feisty.

Pask Small Batch Wild Yeast Hawke's Bay Chardonnay 2016 $25

Kate Radburnd and her team at Pask decided to get jiggy on it with the wild yeasts during the 2016 harvest and this snazzy little sip is the result. People often think if indigenous yeasts are used, the wine is going to smell and taste a tad funky, however this is a dangerously drinkable, clean, tangy, tropical taste sensation that's stitched together with light layers of smoke with every sip.

Also available at bitewine.co.nz.

Tony Bish Skeetfield Hawke's Bay Chardonnay 2016 $56

Prepare for heaping wads of hazelnut, citrus pith, white peach and nutmeg on the nose followed by gorgeous, grapefruit, smoked pineapple and waves of juiciness that flow across the palate. Crafted from old vine, dry-farmed, Mendoza-clone chardonnay from a vineyard named after champion skeet shooter Brick Gunn, this wine is everything you'd expect from one of the Southern Hemisphere's brightest chardonnay stars.

Also available at bitewine.co.nz.