2020 Chardonnay

Have you ever tried a natively fermented wine? What does this even mean?

Natively fermented wine is when the yeast that is naturally found on the grapes in the vineyard are encouraged and utilised by the winemaker to ferment the juice into wine. This can often end up with dirty, unsavoury characters in the wine if done incorrectly, however, we have used all our experience and modern technology to cleanly and successfully ferment our 2020 Chardonnay this year using only the yeast found on the grapes.

Why did we do a native ferment? We did it because we wanted to push the boundaries a little and to bring more complexity and texture to our Chardonnay.

Soft and creamy but with a fresh zing of acidity.

Flavours of peach, lemon and vanilla cream with a hint of coffee.

This Chardonnay was sourced from a premium vineyard close to the winery and the fruit was harvested at sunrise.

The grapes were pressed off very quickly to separate the juice from the skins as soon as possible and to prevent the phenolics leeching into the juice and the resulting wine.

"I wanted this wine to be soft and delicate so minimising the skin contact helped eliminate the undesirable extraction of phenolics from the skins and seeds, and reduced the need for me to soften the wine further before bottling.” Dan Berrigan

The fermentation was initially completed in stainless steel vats and the fermenting wine was transferred to barrels when almost dry.

For 8 months this Chardonnay was matured in a combination of new, 1 yr old and 2 yr old fine-grained French oak barriques whilst also receiving regular lees stirring (re-suspending the yeast that has fallen to the bottom of the tank after ferment). This helped soften the wine naturally and built the mid-palate while introducing more flavour and complexity into the wine.

2020 Chardonnay - released Oct 2020

Silver medal Melbourne International Wine Challenge (2019)

Silver medal - Sydney Royal Wine Show (2018)

Soft and hard Cheeses

Seafood

Caesar salad

Pan seared fish