Esk Valley Chardonnay

Wine information: Esk Valley Estate creates some of the most iconic premium, crafted New Zealand wines, at its winery located in the picturesque Hawkes Bay. The winery sources fruit from Hawkes Bay, including the world-renowned Gimblett Gravels and Marlborough, as both regions consistently produce grapes of an extremely high quality. Esk Valley is a boutique winery, but it is unique in that many of the techniques used to craft its award-winning wines are dictated by the winery itself. The old concrete vats, the layout of the buildings, and the absence of modern technology mean the people at Esk Valley have had to make wine in a simple, honest, hands-on way. Fruit for the Esk Valley Chardonnay is sourced from vineyard sites around the Hawkes Bay. Vineyards in the north at Bay View provide the finished wine with ripe tropical fruit flavours while the sites on terraces above the Tutaekuri River at Puketapu, add a more flinty, grapefruit note. These sites also provide the natural acidity to the blended wine. The individual vineyard parcels were kept separate and fermented in a mix of oak barriques (80%) and stainless tanks. Cultured and indigenous yeasts were utilised for fermentation and the finished wines were left on lees until blending and bottling. Thirty percent of the wine underwent malolactic fermentation in barrel to naturally soften the finished wine.This is a full bodied but elegant style of Hawkes Bay Chardonnay, exhibiting ripe stone fruit and melon characters, intermingled with hints of butter, grapefruit and oak. The wine is rich in the mouth, but with excellent acidity, complex and long. Ideally suited to rich seafood or white meat dishes.

 
     

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