OUR STORY
CHARTERIS is owned by Kiwi-born PJ Charteris and his partner Christina (Chrissi) Pattison. PJ has over two decades winemaking experience in both Australia and New Zealand, he also is a senior wine show judge with experience in both regional and capital wine shows that spands over 20 years. PJ currently is the Chairman of Judges at the Royal Adelaide Wine Show.
PJ’s journey has gone full circle and halfway back again, with wines that embrace both his beloved Central Otago and his adoptive Hunter Valley home. It’s emblematic as much as inevitable that the business is shared with his other love - partner Christina (Chrissi) Pattison whom he met while serving as head winemaker and Chrissi, Marketing Manager at Hunter icon Brokenwood Wines. PJ Cut his teeth pruning vines in NZ as a teenager before coming to Australia in 1988 to study winemaking at Roseworthy. He first set foot in the Hunter Valley in May that year after hitchhiking solo from Adelaide.
His first winemaking gig after graduating was back in the Hunter at Lindeman's, where years later he’d end up spending 12 years at Brokenwood. He was fortunate enough to be one of the first Len Evans Tutorial Scholars.
When it came time to start their own label, some soul searching drew PJ back to his motherland, spurred by visions of crafting great Riesling, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grown in Central Otago, New Zealand. His first release was the Charteris The Winter Vineyard Pinot Noir in 2008. Those vine varieties are famed as perhaps the most powerful transmitters of place, thus offering PJ an outlet to satiate that thirst for connection to his Kiwi homeland and a means to convey those uniquely dramatic landscapes to wine-lovers elsewhere.
Years later, in 2019 a stirring within prompted PJ to add to that yin the Aussie yang coming back to producing wines under his own label from the Hunter Valley. So Semillon, Chardonnay and Shiraz are the grapes to paint the other half of the picture. Hunter Semillon, renowned the world over for its inimitable personality, is itself an enigma. PJ sees it as “a complex amalgam of one thing”. And the Hunter Shiraz, another deceptively simple trick - a subtly complex wine that requires skill, instinct and a lifetime’s experience to get right. Chardonnay completes the Hunter tapestry with purity and elegent finesse at it's core.
When you move through a landscape that moves you, emotions flow without reflection. Like with love, it’s hard to pick apart the threads. It can take years of searching and striving to see all the angles that make the moment. And to put it back together so a stranger might savour the same? Even longer. And that is CHARTERIS. The joy of times and places fixed and fleeting, personal and universal.