"Wonderfully ripe and inviting, the bouquet shows sweet nectarine, rockmelon, fig and roasted hazelnut characters with a touch of vanilla. It is beautifully weighted and plush on the palate, delivering excellent fruit purity and power backed by refreshing acidity, finishing long and delicious. At its best: now to 2023" Sam Kim, Wine Orbit, Jul 2019

Lovely golden colour in the glass. Ripe peach and melon layered with butterscotch and toasty oak notes. The palate is big, rich and full with great length and weight.

The grapes for this elegant Gisborne Chardonnay are grown from two select parcels from the Briant and Tietjen vineyards. The wine is made from a mixture of Chardonnay clones, creating a wine with more layers of flavour and complexity; 50% Mendoza, 35% ENTAV-INRA 548 and 15% ENTAV-INRA. Premium Burgundies use 809 as a blending component to give them a lovely aromatic lift and so we apply this principle to our wonderfully layered Chardonnay. The vines achieved good ripeness and with low yields came excellent flavours and weight to the fruit.

Harvested in the cool of the morning, the fruit for this wine reached superb ripeness after another warm Summer in Gisborne. A portion of the grapes were hand-picked and a portion machine harvested, gently pressed and slightly clarified prior to fermentation. The juice was inoculated with the indigenous yeast from this vineyard, which provided layers of flavour and aroma complexity, as well as a wonderful palate texture. The juice was cool fermented till dry and then underwent full malolactic fermentation and spent 4 months on lees before being stabilized and bottled. A portion of the blend is fermented and aged in a combination of American and European barrels. The barrels selected here are from the parcels we don’t deem quite good enough to make the Irwin status but are still of exceptional quality to even be considered! The wine also undergoes full malolactic fermentation.

Food Pairing: Enjoy with seafood, white meats and cheeses.