Collection: 2025 Hamilton Russell "They ought to be atop your Burgundy-style wish list"

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South African Pinot Noir and Chardonnay specialist Hamilton Russell is a name that encapsulates the very best that South Africa has to offer on a global scale, and we're delighted to offer the 2025s making their debut in the Honest Grapes cellars.

“Hamilton Russell Estate wines are not attention-seekers but they undoubtedly offer some of the finest, most individual, expressions of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay anywhere in the world”
Andy Howard MW, Decanter

The Hamilton Russell story begins in 1975, when Tim Hamilton Russell planted vines in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley, determined to prove that South Africa could produce Pinot Noir and Chardonnay capable of standing alongside the world's best. It was a lonely conviction at the time. The valley was remote, the climate untested for fine wine, and the prevailing wisdom was sceptical. His son Anthony took over in 1991 and has spent the decades since proving the doubters comprehensively wrong. Hamilton Russell Vineyards is now the reference point for South African Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and the estate that opened the door.

Following the difficulties of 2024, the 2025 conditions were close to ideal: a cold winter, clean and even bud break, healthy canopies with no disease pressure, and a compressed harvest finishing February 19th with the fruit at perfect ripeness. Anthony Hamilton Russell considers 2025 one of the best of the estate's 45 vintages to date. That is not a casual remark from a man who chooses his words carefully. Matthew Jukes, writing last month, called them "finely wrought, mineral-soaked, ultrasophisticated wines with transcendent flavours" and made them his wines of the week in March, he went onto to describe them as wines that "ought to be atop your Burgundy-style wish list".

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