Winemaker Notes
Clover Hill 2004 is crafted according to traditional methods and matured on lees in its bottle for a minimum 3 years. It contains components of selected reserve wines aged in French oak foudres to ensure the unique personality that is the Clover Hill house style.
Clover Hill is one of Australia’s principal Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier Cuvées. Founded by the Goelet family on the site of a former dairy farm in north-east Tasmania, Clover Hill was established in 1986 after an exhaustive search for an ideal site for the sole purpose of producing world-class sparkling wine to rival that of the Champagne region. The site, with its rich soil, natural sloping amphitheatre and maritime climate, was deemed to be the perfect location to produce superb Méthode Traditionnelle sparkling wine, rivaling the great Champagne Houses of France.
Directly south of the city of Melbourne and the Mornington Peninsula wine region, the cool-climate island of Tasmania has earned an honorable reputation as the country’s finest producer of Sparkling Wine. Naturally the region also excels in top quality still wines from Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Riesling, all distinguished because of a high natural acidity. Most of the Tasmania vineyards cluster around the eastern side of the island from north to south.
Representing the topmost expression of a Champagne house, a vintage Champagne is one made from the produce of a single, superior harvest year. Vintage Champagnes account for a mere 5% of total Champagne production and are produced about three times in a decade. Champagne is typically made as a blend of multiple years in order to preserve the house style; these will have non-vintage, or simply, NV on the label. The term, "vintage," as it applies to all wine, simply means a single harvest year.