Winemaker Notes
Pairs well with pan-fried scallops.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Where the cool 2012 vintage shows almond meal and oat at this 10-year interval, the nine-year-old 2013 Chardonnay hails from a warm vintage, and that has built a robustness into the wine. This is powerful and long, with no break in programming over the palate. It’s seriously good, seriously fresh and full. The acidity is saline and refreshing, and it's woven with invisible threads throughout each part of the wine. With incredible intensity and lingering fruit, it’s simply awesome. This has entered a new phase of drinking here, reaching an apogee moment in time. Sensational. Best After 2022
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Tasting Panel
Light, bright yellow. Deeply pitched pear, melon and honey aromas are complicated by suggestions of tarragon and jasmine. Sappy, supple and round, offering poached pear and fennel flavors underscored by a strong suggestion of smoky minerals. Offers an attractive combination of richness and vivacity, finishing juicy and very long, with floral and mineral notes.
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Wine & Spirits
Michael Hill Smith and Martin Shaw, of Shaw & Smith, recently purchased this vineyard in the Coal River Valley, Australia’s driest cool-climate growing region. Tolpuddle, originally planted in 1988, already had a strong reputation for its fruit. In 2013, that fruit comes across as barely ripe peach skin and nectarine. The broad leesiness is a little distracting at first, but then the wine opens up toward richness, with firm acidity reading in a lemon-and-apple tightness to focus it. Decant this for light game, like braised rabbit.
One of the most popular and versatile white wine grapes, Chardonnay offers a wide range of flavors and styles depending on where it is grown and how it is made. While it tends to flourish in most environments, Chardonnay from its Burgundian homeland produces some of the most remarkable and longest lived examples. California produces both oaky, buttery styles and leaner, European-inspired wines. Somm Secret—The Burgundian subregion of Chablis, while typically using older oak barrels, produces a bright style similar to the unoaked style. Anyone who doesn't like oaky Chardonnay would likely enjoy Chablis.
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.