Emma and Rod Easthope. Easthope Family Winegrowers

Long-time readers of The Real Review will already be familiar with the name Easthope Family Winegrowers, because Rod Easthope was the chief winemaker at Craggy Range until he departed (to start his own wine brand) after the 2012 vintage.

They didn’t officially launch Easthope Family Winegrowers until the 2014 vintage was released. The intervening years saw Rod work with Naked Wines while establishing his own wine brand. The Family in the name refers to Rod and Emma Easthope as well as their three children who feature prominently in cameo on the label.

Both Rod and Emma are from local Hawke’s Bay wine families and prior to their own family label, Emma worked at Stonyridge and Martinborough Vineyard. Their first releases were from special sites in Hawke’s Bay but they found a 20ha site of their own in Mangatahi district, 165m above sea level, perched above the windswept cliffs on the south side of the Ngaruroro River. This is what they call the Home Block and it has been progressively planted since 2014 (their 2014 vintage was not from these vines, clearly). To supplement the fruit from their own vineyard, they also source from Ian and Linda Quinn’s famed Two Terraces Vineyard, which lies a few kilometres further down the river.

They live on site, close to the cliffs and the 3ha which they’ve planted stretch in small parcels on gentle slopes up from the house. Syrah was the first variety to go into the ground in 2014, then chardonnay in 2015 and 2019, as well as riesling, gamay and pinot noir. The syrah and earlier plantings of chardonnay became productive in 2019 with syrah being released as a single-vineyard wine from 2020. Chardonnay joined the family with the 2023 vintage. The Easthopes chose to plant the Baileys clone of syrah and 548 chardonnay, both at 4,000 vines/ha density.

The farming is entirely done by hand and the vines are dry-grown, which can be challenging on a windy site like the home block. As a result, yields are naturally low with the 2024 syrah coming in at a tiny 2 tonnes/ha.

The winemaking for the Home Block Syrah is marked by the choice of utilising 100% whole bunches with careful extraction. The fermentation is hand-plunged and cuvaison lasts two weeks before going into only used Chassin French oak puncheons. After 14 months, it is bottled unfined with no temperature stabilisation. It is always a perfumed syrah but 2024 takes it up another notch in elegance and definition. For those who appreciate a lighter, floral and exotic expression of syrah, this is very good.

They also made a rosé from the syrah grown here for the first time in 2024, a pale-coloured beauty which has mineral restraint and beguiling floral characters set against the complex fruit and salinity wound around its core. No rush to drink this either as it will develop in bottle.

After the difficulty of the 2023 vintage, the Home Block Chardonnay 2024 is a triumph, highlighting the mineral, saline and floral aspects of their site in a different form than the rosé; more slate than chalk and sweeter apple blossoms. Underneath is a gorgeously nutty palate with just-ripe stone-fruit and long salinity, culminating in a classy glass of chardonnay which will have no trouble developing in bottle.

It was whole-bunch pressed as cloudy juice directly into Chassin oak barrels for fermentation and ageing (20% of which were new). It was left on lees and completed malolactic conversion in the spring. After 10 months in barrel, the wine was bottled.

This is a remarkably singular site and in the skilled hands of the Easthope family, a new star joins the constellation of Hawke’s Bay’s bright future. I eagerly await their upcoming releases from the Home Block.