Mahi Marlborough Chardonnay 2024

Description

Apricot, Cream, Oak

We love Chardonnay! This wine is a complex, textural wine that exhibits the slight creaminess on the mid-palate that is the key characteristic of Chardonnay. The structure still retains acidity giving length and freshness.

Mahi, meaning ‘our work, our craft’, began in 2001, fulfilling a dream of ours. After 15 vintages it was time to do our own thing. With a strong focus on single-vineyard wines, and now backed up by a series of premium regional wines from Marlborough, the idea behind Mahi is to respect and promote the individuality of the various vineyards. The Mahi symbol represents the strength, life, and growth of the native New Zealand frond (fern), with the understanding that wine should never be rushed to bottle, respecting its ability to evolve naturally over time.

This year, our 24th, was again distinctive and was our earliest finish ever. It always seems that winemakers are raving about the latest vintage, but I know that I can quite comfortably say that this vintage looks like it will be in the top five that I have ever worked. The fruit was possibly the cleanest we have ever seen, the crops were small, the rainfall low and the flavours ripe. We had a cool snap early-mid December, which is when we were flowering, then an amazing period through the rest of December and January, before ‘normal’ temperatures in February and a cooler March. Because of the coolness over flowering, we ended up with low pollination, and low crops, which ripened well through that warm period but also retained the acidity and freshness as February and March were not super-hot. A stunner, and so easy to work!

The aim for this Chardonnay is to retain a fresh structure with a complex palate. It is the vineyards, wild-ferment and barrel characters that make up the complex nose and palate. This fruit comes from three vineyards; the Taylor Vineyard, (19%) which is in the Rapaura area, the Twin Valleys vineyard (75%), which we have been working with since 2003 and ten rows of Clone 1066 (6%) from the Mahi home block. All of the vines were intensively hand-tended, and the grapes hand-picked and then taken to the winery for whole-cluster pressing. Only using the free-run portion, the resulting juice went straight to French oak barrels without any additions and fermented with indigenous yeast from the various vineyards. After fermentation the wine sat on yeast lees for eleven months prior to blending and bottling.