2023 Chardonnay

Production:  430 dozen

Colour: Pale straw with green hues.

Aroma: A complex array of lifted aromas leap from the glass. Fresh quince, pink grapefruit and lemon zest intertwined with toasted almonds and hints of vanilla bean and flint stone. Intriguing and alluring!

Palate: White peach and nectarine fruit with underlying preserved lemon notes are a lovely introduction on the palate. Unami and flinty nuances follow adding layers of complexity. A richer styled Chardonnay, with creaminess from the wild ferment and lees stirring and a and a crispness from the acidity culminating in a beautifully balanced, textural wine with great length and weight.

Awards and Reviews:

New Release May 2024

Vinification: A blend of fruit that was both tenderly handpicked and machine harvested on the 27th Feb and 4 March respectively to ensure precise fruit flavour profiles. The handpicked fruit was pressed direct to barrel, with the machine harvested being pressed to tank before filling the oak. A combination of 40% new oak comprising of 225L French oak barriques and a 500L puncheon were used. Unsettled juice was wild fermented for around 3 weeks, after which 25% went thru malolactic fermentation, the barrels were stirred weekly for 2 months then monthly to add a depth and creaminess to the palate. After 4 months in oak, the unfined wine was filtered prior to bottling on 18th November 2023.

Viticulture: The vineyard is grown naturally using organic biological principals. No use of herbacides and creating biodiversity through multi specie cover crops. Canopy management is vital, hedging, leaf plucking and fruit thinning are used to control exposure to sunlight, increase airflow and further our effort to deliver perfectly ripe, balanced grapes to the winery. 

Vintage 2023  9/10: Winter was cool and long here in Margret River with even a few frosts that are very rare. This helped with dormancy and pruning could be done in a timely manner. It stayed cool all the way through till the end of November pushing budbreak and flowering back up to 3 weeks on last year. By the end of November the weather was perfect without a drop of rain till 3rd of March. Warm but not hot conditions with temperatures around 30 degrees helped things catch up from the late spring. No Marri blossom has meant there were a lot of nets on and off protecting fruit from birds as it ripens. Yields were higher than the previous two vintages and the overall quality of fruit is exceptional.