Xavier Goodridge is a small Gippsland producer established in 2016 by its founder and winemaker of the same name, who began with a single barrel of pinot noir while working at Bress and has since built an acclaimed range of single-site wines. The Avon Chardonnay takes its name from the Avon River district around Maffra in eastern Gippsland and comes from a single hectare of old vines planted in 1987. Farming follows organic practice, with low yields off mature vines giving concentration and detail. The cool, maritime-influenced Gippsland climate produces a restrained, high-acid style, and the 2024 season yielded fruit of notable purity and drive from this established block.

This is a chardonnay made in a low-intervention, Burgundian-influenced idiom, with critic Mike Bennie drawing comparisons to the wines of Valette and Cossard. The fruit was whole-bunch pressed and barrel-fermented in French oak, with wild-yeast ferment and extended lees contact building the savoury, complex profile of cashew, hazelnut, nougat and struck-flint notes the wine shows. Oak is used as a textural frame rather than a flavour, and the wine retains a saline, mineral cut and uplifting freshness. Precise new-oak percentages and malolactic detail for the 2024 were not published, so those specifics are described in general terms consistent with the house style.