Lorraine Leheny

The Recognition The accolade lands on a wine tied closely to place: Roy’s Hill in Hawke’s Bay, where the La Collina vineyard sits on a steep north-northwest-facing slope. The vineyard was planted from 1998, and the gradient was too steep for machinery, so the slope was hand-terraced. That physical fact matters in the glass. At Bilancia, Leheny and Warren Gibson make Hawke’s Bay Chardonnay and Syrah, plus a very small volume of a field-blend white, from their own La Collina vineyard and selected single-vineyard sites around the region. The company is known for Chardonnay and Syrah from Hawke’s Bay, especially the cuvée La Collina. Its flagship, La Collina Syrah, is the wine that drew the strongest outside recognition, first through Larkin’s 2023 description and then through the 98+ score for the 2024 release in *The Wine Advocate* in 2025.

The Work

Behind It The name Bilancia means balance, harmony and equilibrium in Italian. It also reflects the founders’ shared Libran identity and the scales emblem, a compact philosophy for wines built around proportion rather than force. Leheny’s own words make that outlook plain: “Wine is a journey, not a destination!” The sentence reads less like a slogan than a working position for a vigneron whose wines are bound to a specific slope, selected single-vineyard sources, and the patient demands of Chardonnay and Syrah. Tiratore Chardonnay gives another precise view of the work. It is a single-vineyard Chardonnay from the gentle slope, lower terraces and gravel flats of La Collina vineyard; its name refers to old spent bullets found when the vines were being planted. That detail sits beside the harder geometry of the Syrah site: steep exposure, north-northwest aspect, hand-built terraces, and a vineyard at Roy’s Hill that became central to the company’s identity. The result is not a broad claim about Hawke’s Bay, but a set of named wines from named ground.

The Road Leheny studied at Roseworthy Agricultural College, a key piece of formal wine education before the Hawke’s Bay chapter that defines her public work. In 1997, she founded Bilancia in Hawke’s Bay, setting the course for a small, site-led production centered on Chardonnay and Syrah. Her role now spans both land and cellar. She is owner and vigneron at Bilancia, and also serves as Director/Winemaker of Bilancia Limited in Havelock North, New Zealand. Across those roles, the through-line is unusually clear: a company founded in 1997, a vineyard planted from 1998, and a flagship Syrah later singled out by one of wine criticism’s most visible publications. The work carries its authority through specificity — Hawke’s Bay fruit, Roy’s Hill terraces, La Collina Syrah, Tiratore Chardonnay — rather than scale.