Nose
This West Australian Ice Pressed Chardonnay has all the hallmarks of a great dessert wine. This wine has an array of aromas, banana bread, honeycomb and apricot nectar, marzipan and almond paste - quite a heady mix.
Palate
This wine is richer than it’s predecessors and more intensely flavoured and still has a whip of lime sorbet acidity to nicely balance the high sugar content of the wine. There are flavours of lime and apricot and juicy pears with hints of almond paste and vanilla. It is concentrated and slippery with a viscous mouth coating texture with a little oak tannin to clean up the finish.
Growing Conditions
A good amount of rainfall over winter (May – September) set up the soil moistures and filled the dams full for the upcoming 2018 vintage. The temperatures during Spring were right bang in the middle of our decade averages and the benign weather over Spring was ideal for flowering, so crop set was high for the second year in a row. The Red Gum blossom was also the best we’ve ever seen so the Silvereye bird damage was the least we’ve seen! We still applied bird nets to play it safe though. There were 3 main rain events during the growing season but none too worrying. The February temperatures were among the coolest, but then in the first 2 weeks of March we had 5 days above 30 º C. Overall during the ripening period for grapes the average over Jan-April was lower temperature than average with no noticeable heat spikes making for grapes with lovely fragrance, higher acidities and higher sugar levels than normal.
