Gifting has never been easier
Perfect if you're short on time or are unable to deliver your gift yourself. Enter your message and select when to send it.
Description
Hope Springs Eternal is Bondar's brand-new, ultra-premium project with a vision to craft elegant, age-worthy wines that can go toe-to-toe with the best in the country from the absolute best vineyard sites in South Australia.
This tier is strictly allocated and usually kept entirely for their own wine club members, but we've managed to secure a tiny look at these 2024 releases. Because quantities are so minuscule, we are offering them exclusively as a complete three-pack featuring the 95+ point Chardonnay, 96-point Shiraz, and 97-point Grenache. There are just 24 packs available, so if you want a piece of Bondar history for the cellar, you’ll need to move fast.
- 2024 Bondar Hope Springs Eternal Chardonnay
- 2024 Bondar Hope Springs Eternal Grenache
- 2024 Bondar Hope Springs Eternal Shiraz
2024 Bondar Hope Springs Eternal Chardonnay
Hope Springs Eternal is a highly anticipated new project for Andre and Selina Bondar, designed with a singular focus: to craft elite, age-worthy wines from the absolute best vineyard sites in the region.
For the inaugural 2024 Chardonnay, they headed up to the high-altitude Bowyer Ridge vineyard in Lobethal, sitting at over 500 meters above sea level. This is a micro-production release sourced from just three select French oak barriques. The winemaking is beautifully stripped back and unadorned - free of flashy cellar tricks - allowing the cool-climate fruit to speak for itself, though it did undergo full malolactic fermentation to weave a subtle creaminess into its structural frame.
The result is a tightly coiled powerhouse that has already scooped a massive 95+ points from the Halliday Wine Companion. It's a pristine, drive-y wine built for the long haul. Give it a year in the cellar to fully stretch its legs, and watch it evolve beautifully over the next decade.
95+ points
"This needs a little time, with winemaking tricks pleasingly absent, but the acidity is coiled, crimping in flavour, of which there is ample, and texture. Time will heal. Cool nectarine, moving into ripeness, lemon, green pear, a stone fruit-kernel nuttiness, fig leaf, faint traces of oak spice. There’s a little creaminess, a crème brûlée note, appealingly fine pithiness and then the acid drive. The length is impressive. Just give this a year or so to bring out its best – it will be interesting to see its arc."
- Marcus Ellis (Halliday Wine Companion)
2024 Bondar Hope Springs Eternal Grenache
The final piece in Bondar’s Hope Springs Eternal trifecta is a spectacular, deeply intellectual take on McLaren Vale Grenache.
While the flagship Rayner Vineyard Grenache is highly prized, Andre went hunting for an even more elite expression of the variety. They found it in the heart of the Blewitt Springs "purple patch" - sourcing fruit from Sue Trott’s famous vineyard, planted to bush vines back in 1952. Grown on deep sand, this site is legendary for producing Grenache with an entirely different kind of gravity.
The 2024 vintage was fermented with a high proportion of whole bunches (around 60%) using a incredibly gentle extraction technique. To keep the focus purely on the site’s exceptional fruit quality, it was matured in a careful mix of seasoned Austrian oak, ceramic eggs, and sandstone amphorae.
The result is a monumental red that scored a massive 97 points from the Halliday Wine Companion. Marcus Ellis notes that instead of broad, easy pleasures, this is a wine of "deep intrigue and savoury complexity." It bursts with wild raspberry, sour cherry, goji berry, and orange-poached rhubarb, all backed by notes of rosehip tea and moody florals. The massive whole-bunch component is brilliantly integrated, giving the wine a tense, structurally corded frame of silty, chewy tannins and bright acidity. It is an extraordinary, savoury, and age-worthy Grenache that showcases just how noble this variety can be.
97 points
"The Trott vineyard often throws darker fruits and moodier florals, and they’re here, yet the core remains red fruited and the structure is agreeably tense, a conduit for the twin charge of acidity and silty, chewy tannins. The high whole-bunch component builds that tannin, plus adds spice, but is also discreet. Wild raspberry, sour black and red cherry, redcurrant gel, goji, rosehip tea, orange poached rhubarb. It’s a wine of deep intrigue rather than easy pleasures, savoury, structurally corded, far from difficult, but a wine to age, as is the intent."
- Marcus Ellis (Halliday Wine Companion)
2024 Bondar Hope Springs Eternal Shiraz
The second installment in Bondar’s elite Hope Springs Eternal micro-project is a spectacular, single-barrel release that marks a career high for winemaker Andre Bondar.
The fruit comes from a prized, elevated block of 1971-planted vines at the certified biodynamic Hickinbotham Vineyard in Clarendon. Grown on red soils studded with ironstone, this cool-climate site yields fruit of incredible focus. Andre fermented this mostly as whole bunches and gave it a patient, two-year élevage in a single, old, thick-walled 600L demi-muid. Total production is a tiny 600 bottles.
Scoring 96 points from the Halliday Wine Companion, reviewer Marcus Ellis notes its stunning refinement and compact structure. It is packed with dark plum, blackberry, sour cherry, and a graphitic, granitic mineral quality, all backed by tobacco leaf and dried herbs. It is a brooding, detailed masterpiece built for the long haul. If you’re cracking one early, give it plenty of air to watch those complex layers unfurl.
96+ points
"There’s a compactness here, a finely packed spiciness, a graphitic and almost granitic mineral quality, dried herbs, tobacco and a twiggy snap in the background. Refinement reigns, like the grenache in the range, with time the key, though abundant air reveals layer after layer of subtle detail. A wine of real cellar potential."
- Marcus Ellis (Halliday Wine Companion)
| Country | Australia |
| Australian State | SA |
| Feature |
High Score |
| Size | 6 |
Others also liked
Recently viewed
Common Questions
Delivery is free on orders of $199 or more.
For orders under this amount, delivery is calculated at checkout based on your postcode. You can order in any quantity or combination of wines you like. Straight dozens are not required.
We will dispatch your order the same or next business day.
Estimated delivery transit time varies depending on your location. Please review this page for specific estimates.
No sorry we do not have a store front and pickup is not available.
Yes, no problem. When placing your order select ‘Store at Different Drop and Delivery Later’ as your shipping method or reply to the order confirmation email after placing your order with additional instructions.
We stock three different sized gift boxes (single, three bottle and six), all are available for purchase for a flat rate of $8. They look great and make an awesome impression.
To add a gift box to your order, simply add at checkout. The special requests box is your friend, please give us as many details of what you are looking for and we will try our best, or get in contact to discuss it with you.
If you want to bulk order gifts or if you have any trouble please email hello@differentdrop.com or call and we can try and help.
Our warehouse is automated so unless you tell us otherwise, we will ship your order. If you would like us to hold your order please reply to the order confirmation email after placing your order and we are happy to store your order for up to 6 months at no charge. You can review our heat policy here.
Yes, of course. We want Different Drop customers to always be getting the best price. You can see our price match policy here.
No, feel free to mix it up! There is no minimum requirement. You can order wines in any quantity or combination, 1 or 50+ bottles.
No, all prices are set at the full discounted dozen rate already.
Most wine retailers list at a single-bottle price and then discount 10–15% when you buy six or twelve. We've taken the opposite approach. Since the overwhelming majority of our orders are already 6 bottles or more, our list price is set for the case buyer from the start. There's no inflated single-bottle price to discount down from.
What that means for you:
- One price, same for everyone — no minimum to hit to unlock the best rate
- No mixed-six gymnastics to qualify for a discount
- Our single-bottle price is typically at or below a traditional retailer's by-the-dozen rate
Put simply: the box discount is already baked into the price.
**And if you find it cheaper elsewhere?** Let us know. If the same wine is available at a lower price at another retailer (including at their mixed-six or by-the-dozen rate) we're happy to match it.
If you can't add more wine to your cart it means we are low on stock of that wine. For example, if you are only able to 3 bottles and no more that means we only have 3 bottles left of that wine. If it's a must have, please contact us and we may be able to order more in for you.
Need a hand?
We’d love to help you out! Email is usually best but if it’s something urgent or you just really want to have a yarn about wine, food, or even the meaning of life, give us a call — we’re here for you.