Blank Canvas Reed Vineyard Chardonnay 2022

The Reed Vineyard Chardonnay is an incredibly textured, savoury wine. It parades a bounty of fleshy white nectarine and orchard fruit, flint-focused precision and a grainy, honeyed richness. Its vividly sketched acidity allows it to carry the powerful but savoury oak in a defined yet impressive manner. The full solids fermentation with 100% wild yeast and 12 months lees ageing without battonage has given multitudinous layers of complexity. This is a wine for drinking now for its crystalline purity or cellaring and reaping the benefits of tertiary development in many years to come.

Simply and sincerely made, this Chardonnay was gently whole-bunch pressed with the very cloudy free-run juice going to new and seasoned French oak puncheons (500L), approximately 40% new oak. There it eventually commenced fermentation with ambient yeast and was left to complete both primary and natural malolactic fermentation without disturbance. It was carefully racked out of oak to spend a further several months on light lees before being bottled without fining or filtration on the 9th March 2023.