Fraser Gallop Estate 2011 Winery Chardonnay

The Winery Chardonnay is a new addition to the Fraser Gallop Estate range. It has less oak and emphasises the crisp pristine fruit flavours of our Gin-Gin clone chardonnay coming from a very special site.

This chardonnay is more complex than the usual “un-oaked” chardonnay by the number of techniques used in the making of it. The best way to explain this wine is to say it is more “Chablis” in style - a leaner more acidic style with minimal oak influence and no Malolactic Fermentation and mostly fermented in steel tanks or older oak barrels. These wines more truly reflect the terroir as they don't have other winemaking artefacts like new oak, high solids, malolactic, lots of lees stirring flavours to hide behind.

Wine lovers will now have choice as to which wine to pair with their meals. I know I will be shucking oysters with this one, and matching abalone with the Fraser Gallop Estate Parterre chardonnay.

Winemaker's Notes

Vintage 2011
We had a fairly cool and wet winter that replenished the sub-soil moisture profiles and the dams overflowed as usual although a bit later. A picture perfect spring and early flowering (9 days earlier) gave us a very early start to vintage. In January we received 40mm of rain from cyclone Bianca that was a blessing to replenish the sub soil moisture, which is so important for our unirrigated vines and helped to get slightly higher bunch weights in the white varieties. Also bringing the vintage forward was the consistent heat during February with our hottest day just under 40°C at the end of February. This run of warm weather continued into March and April! Plus unusual nights consistently above 20°C. This had the effect of speeding up the ripening of the white varieties and the reds came on quickly as well with the earliest finish to vintage ever with Petit Verdot on the 23rd of March.

Viticultural Notes
The Chardonnay is sourced off unirrigated blocks and some irrigated blocks of Mendoza clone (Gin-Gin clone) resulting in concentrated fruit and the vines are caned pruned to ensure the fruit is of the highest quality. Throughout the growing season two passes with the vine trimmer were required to ensure maximum fruit exposure. Just after berry set the vines were leaf plucked both sides of the vines to open the canopy and ensure good fruit exposure to aid in flavour development.

Winemaking Notes
Once hand harvested the fruit was transferred in small slotted bins directly to cool rooms and chilled to 8°C overnight. The bunches were gently whole bunch pressed to around 500L/tonne. This allowed us to only extract the juice from the fleshy interior of the berries and not the juice next to the skin, thereby minimising phenolic (tannic) pick up and resulting in a juice with exquisite seamless structure. The chardonnay juice was then pumped to a stainless steel tank with one to one ratio height to width, where it was chilled and settled without enzymes for 24 hours before gravity flow to older French barriques, 270 L stainless steel barrels and steel tanks. Fermentation was mostly initiated by wild yeast (indigenous yeasts found in the vineyard) and the barrels were transferred to the cool room for fermentation and the temperature was kept below 20°C to retain primary fruit characters. After fermentation the barrels were stirred weekly for a month, this resulted in a creamy mouth feel to complement the linear acid structure of the wine. The wine was blended 6 months later; cold stabilised and cross flow filtered before bottling September 19, 2011.

Nose

A beautifully scented wine with wet slate, white fruits and citrus flowers and a lovely purity about it.

Palate

Initially you might say the palate is simple however with time it reveals a refreshing crystalline minerality that makes it mouth-wateringly morish. Flavours of pears and grapefruit linger with a crisply dry finish.

Cellaring

The wine will continue to develop with up to 5 years careful cellaring.