Bright pale green-strawl as expected, an immaculately proportioned and balanced wine with great drive and impeccable line; all the vineyard and winemaker inputs are seamlessly welded, making flavour descriptors unnecessary.
96 Points…
…Brian Croser’s Tappanappa, Tiers Vineyard Chardonnay 2007 Adelaide Hills was a tense, introvert and lime-scented wine…
Inquiring subsequently about how exactly the Tappanappa wine had been made, I found that the yeast had been a single strain isolated from a …
The Tapanappa collaboration brings together local legend Brian Croser and French wine identities Jean-Michel Cazes and Arnould d’Hautefeuille. The result is high-quality wines such as this smoothly complex Adelaide Hills chardonnay. Stone fruit, grapefruit, mealy notes and nutty oak combine …
Brian Croser has made a beautiful Adelaide Hills chardonnay, delicate and understated but with great flavour complexity and refined texture. Bright and clean with grapefruit, nutty and smoky nuances, properly dry and focused.…
Croser’s wine, from the Tiers Vineyard (planted 1979), is an altogether more subtle wine: luxurious but with finesse and a seamless integration of the fruit, barrel ferment and maturation elements. It just needs time in bottle.…
A superb chardonnay by maestro Brian Croser. It’s about understated complexity; fruit, oak, malolactic and lees characters are in harmony, with concentration and finesse. All it needs is time; if it evolves like the ’05 it will be great.…
Certain politicians like to use the word “un-Australian” in a derogatory sense. I’ll use it here in a very positive way. May Australian chardonnays are driven by fruit at the expense of complexity. Relatively few combine those two key aspects …
93 Points – #1 Rated Wine
The top rated wine in the report, the 2006 Tiers Vineyard Chardonnay from Tapanappa comes from Adelaide Hills, the Piccadilly Valley. The Tiers vineyard site was planted by Brian Croser back in 1978 when …
Brian Croser’s efforts with Tiers Vineyard Chardonnay have finally paid off in a big way. This is a plump, amply textured wine that doesn?t lack for elegance, marrying scents and flavors of toasted grain with white peaches and hazelnuts. Long …
Notably sweet, smooth texture. Just the merest hint of coffee and spice (perhaps because of the Vosges oak used? ? new and old). Good acidity but texture is really is its strong suit, from vines planted in 1979. Some creamy …
92 points.
Pale yellow. Highly perfumed nose offers a complex array of smoky, leesy citrus and pit fruit aromas underscored by toasty oak and sweet butter. The fresh peach and yellow plum flavors possess impressive depth and are nicely brightened …
Former Petaluma supremo Brian Croser had to treat his vineyard owner wife Ann to a week in the best hotel in Paris to convince her to release half of the chardonnay grapes from her Tiers Vineyard in the Piccadilly Valley …
Meaning ‘Stick to the path’ in aboriginal language, Tapanappa is a super-premium Australian label, launched by one of the great names of Australian winemaking, Brian Croser (left). Croser found fame as owner and winemaker at Petaluma, one of Australia’s icon …
The concept of Tapanappa is to make ultra-premium, terroir-specific wines from their South Australian vineyards. Tiers vineyard was selected for the Chardonnay because it “mirrors the southern end of the Côte de Beaune, where the great Montrachets are grown.” The …
Later that day I proceeded to dinner with the same underlying message: there is never enough great wine and always too much mediocre product, the main virtue of which is its alcohol content. At the dinner the hosts were the …
Tapanappa is a joint venture between Brian Croser, Bollinger and the Cazes family (who own Lynch Bages in Bordeaux). The fruit is sourced from the Tiers vineyard in the Adelaide Hills (Croser retained ownership of the vineyard after Lion Nathan …
Another data point for the Chardonnay trail, an unofficial series of notes on examples of this variety that have been accumulating on my blog in recent weeks.
This time it’s off to Australia – the Piccadilly Valley of South Australia, …
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