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CHARDONNAY |
Lightly Oaked Gisborne |
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Vintage |
2015 |
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Region |
Peter Briant’s vineyard, Patutahi , Gisborne |
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Winemaking |
When ripe the grapes are machine harvested at night, pressed, the juice is gel floated and inoculated with D47 yeast. Cool ferment is followed by full malolactic fermentation in the presence of an oak fan to touch the wine with oak |
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Colour/Appearance |
Pale gold/straw |
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Bouquet/Nose |
Toasty oak aromatics, hints of melon and stonefruit |
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Palate/taste |
Rich and ripe, well balanced modern style with creamy oak notes |
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Cellaring |
Drink on release or age for 3-5 years |
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Foods Alcohol Residual Sugar Acidity pH Packaging |
Great on its own or served with seafood and white meat dishes 13% 0 g/l 6 g/l 3.55 12 x 750ml (and 6 x 750ml cartons from 2017) |
Duck Hunter Oaked Gisborne Chardonnay 2015 is quite a departure from most other Australasian commercial chardonnays, especially those labelled as being oaked. First and foremost, this wine would be a great reintroduction to this grape variety for the ‘Anything but Chardonnay’ crowd, who moved away from chardonnay in reaction to the excessively big, buttery, Smokey-Oakey wines which began to appear in NZ in the late 1980s, wines that have mostly disappeared or become so expensive that few follow them. That a number of commercial chardonnay producers still insist on finishing their wines with a lick of dirty-tasting oak flavour is a mystery that remains to be solved, but this Duck Hunter wine is a big part of the solution. Stylistically, the wine convincingly echoes its benchmark, Chablis – a largely unoaked chardonnay from the northernmost (coolest) wine district of the Burgundy region in France. That you’d have to taste an unoaked version of this Duck Hunter wine beside the oaked commercial release to notice the difference, speaks volumes for the subtlety of the winemaking.
This is delicious and quite delicate ‘Bring Back Chardonnay’ wine that is at its best now, but will hold comfortable for a couple of years, and, ‘Chill It (briefly), Don’t Kill It’. This stuff ain’t beer…