Nose
Pure aromas of sweet lime, pear and grapefruit with vanilla cream and spice notes. It’s calling cards are elegance, purity and clarity.
Palate
The composition of fruit and acidity is picture perfect with amazing vitality and freshness. There is a lovely tension in this wine that showcases the vineyard’s credentials perfectly.
Growing Conditions
The Chardonnay is sourced off unirrigated blocks and some irrigated blocks of Mendoza clone (Gin-Gin clone) resulting in concentrated fruit and the vines are caned pruned to ensure the fruit is of the highest quality. Throughout the growing season two passes with the vine trimmer were required to ensure maximum fruit exposure. The eastern side of the North-South vine rows were lightly leaf plucked to allow sunlight onto the grapes whilst protecting the western side from the hot afternoon sun whereas the East-West rows had both sides of the vines leaf plucked to allow more bunch exposure.
Bottling
09/07/2018.
Winemaking
Once hand harvested the fruit was transferred in small slotted bins directly to cool rooms and chilled to 8°C overnight. The bunches were whole bunch pressed with minimal rotation of the press to around 650L/tonne, this allowed us to only extract the juice from the fleshy interior of the berries and not the juice next to the skin, thereby minimising phenolic (tannic) pick up and resulting in a juice with exquisite seamless structure. The chardonnay juice was then pumped to a stainless steel tank with one to one ratio height to width, where it was chilled and settled without enzymes for 24 hours before gravity flow to older French barriques and 270L stainless steel barrels. Fermentation was initiated by wild yeast (indigenous yeasts found in the vineyard) and the barrels were transferred to the cool room for fermentation and the temperature was kept below 20°C to retain primary fruit characters. The wine was prevented from going through Malolactic Fermentation with an early addition of Sulphur Dioxide. The wine was blended 4 months later; cold stabilised and cross flow filtered before bottling.
Appearance
Pristine and clear in the glass with glowing straw green colour.
Food Pairing
The well judged acidity gives the wine its lip smacking qualities to pair well with oysters and other seafood.
