2024 Novum Riverbrook Vineyard Chardonnay, Marlborough

This is very fresh and alluring with precise fruit and lovely ground spice notes melding beautifully. White peach, grapefruit, pear, ground cinnamon, nutmeg, nectarine pulp, powdery peach skin, flint. It deepens with air to reveal apricot kernel, nougat, tangerine, water chestnut and a mineral element – the amalgam of which makes for a very interesting and complex perfume. The palate is at once intense and fresh with stone fruit and spice in the lead again with notes largely akin to the nose, along with a sweet essence of lemon curd and tangerine adding a sense of completeness. There’s some powdery phenolics and a good wash of orange-citrus acidity through a finish of crystalline length. This is very impressive – complex, charming, long and utterly moreish. Brilliant.

95 points Tom Kline for Wine Pilot, August 2026

There is real powdered spice to this wine. Powder ginger, turmeric and cumin. A backbone of yellow peach flesh and golden baked apples. Fruit is ripe, with a twitch of fruit nectar rounding out a full palate. Oak spice is savoury and suits the tones of orchard fruit. A very memorable wine for its shape and grandeur. A touch of white pepper warmth on the finish.

95 points Special Value Shanteh Wale for Halliday Wine Companion, April 2026 

Fantastic wine, taut and youthful with a bouquet of flinty, fresh stone and citrus fruits, a positive, gentle reductive layer and mineral, fine lees complexity. A dry wine with plenty of weight and a satin mouthfeel, flavours range from white apricot and peach to apple and sweet grapefruit. Layers of wood introduce fine tannins and a natural wood sweetness, as well as added complexity and length. Well made, with best drinking from day of purchase through to 2032+.

95 points Cameron Douglas MS, December 2025

This has a very elegant and subtle character, offering delicate stone fruit with a flinty note and a touch of pineapple, chamomile and lemon peel. Medium- to full-bodied, tense and vertical, it’s almost weightless, showing excellent balance between freshness and power. Crystalline minerality with a lift of citrus in the finish. Long and pristine. Drink or hold.

95 points Andrii Stetsiuk for James Suckling, October 2025

The 2024 Chardonnay is excellent. It's toasty and spicy, lean and nutty, with green apple acidity and attractive waxy phenolics that shape the mid-palate and finish. This is a beautiful wine, made as a result of thoughtful farming and endeavour. It has personality and charm, alongside length of flavor and complexity to boot. It's leaner and less obviously "worked" than many Chardonnays I see coming out of Marlborough. This is super and comes recommended. Drink to 2036.

94+ points Erin Larkin for The Wine Advocate, April 2026

Subtle flint and roasted pistachio notes give way to an unusually aromatic chardonnay with a vibrant, exotic fruit character reminiscent of pomegranate and pomelo over more familiar grapefruit and red apple flavours. The mid-weight palate is sleek and slippery, flowing easily over gentle notes of cinnamon oak before joining the amalgam of cashew, cloves and cream on the finish. An elegant wine which will soon shed its flinty shell and reveal more layered subtlety over the mid-term. Drink to 2032.

94 points Stephen Wong MW for The Real Review, October 2025

The classy, tightly structured 2024 vinttage is a distinctive, single-vineyard wine, from vines planted in the central Wairau Valley “likely between 1979 and 1980.” Hand-picked, it was fermented and matured for 13 months in oak barrels (10 per cent new). Bright lemon/green, it is weighty and vibrant, with mouthfilling body, concentrated, ripe, stonefruit flavours, subtle mealy and biscuity notes adding complexity, and cool-climate freshness, elegance and length. Still youthful, it is a finely poised wine with obvious cellaring potential; best drinking 2029+

Five Stars, Michael Cooper Wine Reviews, August 2026

The Riversbrook vineyard was planted in 1979-1980 by winemaker Will Hoe’s parents John and Philippa. Located in the central part of Wairau Valley, the site is a sun-soaked ancient riverbed with free draining greywacke soils and some of Marlborough’s oldest Chardonnay vines, all of which are of the Mendoza clone.

The hand-harvested grapes were whole bunch pressed with a small addition of sulphur using a gentle press cycle. The juice was cold settled for twelve hours before it was placed in primarily seasoned oak barrels for fermentation with indigenous yeasts. The wine rested on lees for 13 months, with stirring occurring monthly on full moon. Bentonite was used for clarification and a small amount of sulphur was added for protection at bottling.

About this producer

Novum is an artisanal, small-batch project of husband-and-wife Will Hoare and Rachel Jackson-Hoare: he a local boy spending his formative years at California’s Au Bon Climat before returning home to a 19-year stint at Fromm, she a geologist that can pick from the likes of Oregon's Veronique Drouhin and Burgundy's Dominique Lafon on her CV. Established in 2016, their Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Syrah wines have become benchmark expressions of premium Marlborough produce.

Latin for new, Novum wines are driven by deliberate restlessness and an aim to answer a single question each vintage: what if?