Outnumbered Hawke's Bay Chardonnay 2017

Description

"Attractively fruited and elegantly fragrant, the bouquet shows apricot, rockmelon, vanilla and hazelnut aromas, followed by a succulent palate that is beautifully weighted and creamy. The wine offers youthful charm and pristine fruit flavours together with stylish oak undertones, leading to a lingering silky finish" Sam Kim, Wine Orbit

Sourced from Hawkes Bay, this is a fruit driven style of Chardonnay showing ripe melon and stonefruit flavours, with a creamy palate and hints of spicy oak on the finish.

The fruit for this wine was grown in two vineyards in the Dartmoor Vally region of Hawkes Bay. The soils here are predominantly stony loams over old river terrace beds. A combination of Mendoza and Clone 6 provide differing flavour profiles, which helps us to increase the complexity of the finished wine. These vines are relatively mature, and are cropped at low yield levels to give intensely flavoured grapes.

The focus in the winery is to capture the pure fruit flavours that come from the vineyard, whilst adding complexity through the winemaking efforts to produce a multi-dimensional wine. This is achieved by using a mixture of tank and a small percentage of oak fermentation of the juice, making use of a combination of cultured and wild yeasts. The wine remained on yeast lees in tank for 9 months before being racked and fined.