Charteris Wines

Charteris is a trans-Tasman story of exploration, love and connection. PJ Charteris is an eternal dreamer whose heart burns with a contradiction: fondness for home and desire to explore.

Kiwi-born PJ’s journey has gone full circle and halfway back, 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, where years later he’d end up spending 12 years at Brokenwood. When it came time to start their own label, some soul-centred magnetism drew PJ back to his motherland, spurred by visions of great Riesling, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grown in Central Otago. Those vine varieties are famed as perhaps the most powerful transmitters of place, thus offering PJ an outlet to satiate that thirst for home and a means to convey those uniquely dramatic landscapes to wine-lovers elsewhere.