Mt Difficulty Chardonnay 2008
This Chardonnay really speaks to the very warm growing season, with tropical melon and pineapple being backed up by a lovely minerality. The palate displays lovely tropical characters, moving into a mid palate with an excellent creamy texture and weight from extended lees contact and barrel ageing. The natural acidity provides a backbone which the fruit flows through.
Cellaring Potential:
Mt Difficulty Estate Chardonnay will improve for 5-7 years given optimal vintage and cellaring conditions.
Vintage:
2008 was a ripe vintage - the concentration of flavours and varietal definition in all the wines is excellent, with fairly typical acid levels.
The 2008 growing season was close to ideal - poor weather during the previous December led to low bunch numbers, then a warm spring with less wind than usual created fantastic flowering conditions. The Grapevision vineyard management team worked hard to manage yields, resulting in a crop level only 10% over our target. A hot and dry summer and autumn lifted the ripeness level of all the wines onto the next plane. The condition of the grapes at harvest was great; with very little variability or shrivel. As is often the case given the dry conditions in Central Otago, we had no botrytis at all.
Vineyards:
The grapes for the wines that carry the Mt Difficulty Estate label are subject to two strict criteria: they are managed under the umbrella of the Mt Difficulty viticultural team and must be sourced from vineyards in Bannockburn. Mt Difficulty Estate Chardonnay is blended from three Bannockburn vineyards – Mansons Farm, Long Gully and Templars Hill. Mansons Farm is made up of fine Bannockburn soil and Molyneux gravels. They are drought-prone, but are suitable to deep-rooted crops. Long Gully consists of Lochar soils which have very weakly developed, thin and wavy clay pans which are deep enough to cause no impediment to roots or drainage. These are well-drained, high pH soils ideally suited to viticulture. They generally have a 30 cm depth of top soil over fine to moderately coarse gravels. Templars Hill consists of a mixture across the vineyard of heavy Scotland Point clay soils alternating with the drought-prone coarse gravel Bannockburn soils. This vineyard is by far the most difficult to manage from an irrigation perspective of all the Mt Difficulty vineyards.
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