Award: Platinum - Best Australian Chardonnay
Score: 95
Tasting notes:
Floral, smoke and citrus fruit bouquet. Great palate - pure, steely, stately and linear. There's great poise and concentration here, with flavours of white peaches, lemon pith and spice. The balance and length are admirable. Will develop well.
Whalebone Vineyard Merlot Cabernet Franc 2012
66/34%, matured for 21 months in French oak (70% new). Spent close on 3 years making its way into bottle, an especially long time for a blend such as this, but it clearly needed it; there is a complex interplay between rich blackcurrant, cedar, cigar box and dried herbs, and a persistent tattoo of fine-grained tannins on the very long paplte. Cork.
Rating 96
To 2037Whalebone Vineyard Cabernet Shiraz 2013
85/15%. The first thing you notice is the liveliness of it; the second is the easygoing complexity; the third is the long chains of tannin. Tobacco and earth run through boysenberry and blackcurrant; smoky oak plays a subtle role. Cork.
Rating 96
To 2030Whalebone Vineyard Merlot Cabernet Franc 2012
2017 vintage was very late in each of Tapanappa’s 3 distinguished sites. The single outstanding feature of the 2017 vintage was that each of the phenological events of the vine’s growing season was delayed by 2 to 3 weeks compared to the average.
The wonderful feature of a delayed harvest is that the grapes undergo the heat sensitive final accumulation of aroma, flavour and colour in much cooler conditions.
A generous, full-bodied, powerful chardonnay with aromas of cashew, pear, creamy lees, and a fairly strong oak component. There is richness and amplitude in the mouth; a trace of grip adds authority to the finish. More complexity will build over time.
94 points
Following on from the success of the 2015 Fleurieu Pinot Noir, the 2015 Tiers Vineyard Chardonnay has just taken out a Master award and equal top score for the entire competition at The Drinks Business 2017 Asian Chardonnay Masters.
You can read the full competition report here: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2017/05/asian-chardonnay-masters-2017-...
About the competition:
The Global Masters is a series of blind tasting competitions, drawing in entries from across the world. One of the key elements to its success is the quality and the dedication of the judges involved.
The 2015 Fleurieu Peninsula Pinot Noir has taken out master pinot - topping its field - at the prestigious 2017 Drinks Business Global Pinot Noir Masters competition. An extraordinary result by any measure.
About the competition:
In a crowded wine competition arena, the drinks business Global Pinot Noir Masters stands out for its assessment of wines purely by grape variety rather than region.
Divided only by price bracket and, for ease of judging, whether the style was oaked or unoaked, the blind tasting format allows wines to be assessed without prejudice about their country of origin.
Your valentine will cry tears of delight when they see this as a gift, just make sure they know it's from you.
9.3/10
Australian chardonnay styles range in style from mouth-puckeringly mean to plump and juicy; from all fruit, to all ‘funk’ (industry jargon for sulphur compounds derived from maturation on dead yeast cells, or lees). In between the extremes lie some of the finest chardonnays in the world. Invariably fermented and matured in oak barrels, the very best seamlessly combine high quality fruit flavours, generally grown in a cool climate, with winemaker-induced characters associated with the barrels, yeast lees and the influence (or not) of a secondary fermentation that converts harsh malic acid to soft lactic acid.
2015 Tiers Vineyard Chardonnay
Bright, light to medium yellow colour with a fresh, clean, bright bouquet of cashew nut, pear and creamy lees, with quite strong oak. The wine is full-bodied and rich, deep and intense, with amplitude and balance, a trace of grip nicely handled. It's a fuller style of chardonnay if not especially detailed in flavour or aroma at this time. The oak is assertive and needs time to mellow. Very good, and it will build further complexity with time.
94 points
2015 Tiers Vineyard 1.5m Chardonnay
It’s not hard to see the reasons why this 2015 Tiers Adelaide Hills Chardonnay is on point. A famous vineyard in the Hills (one of the oldest), with a legend of the industry making the wine and a wine that is comfortably settled in style.
Please, keep delivering complex, tight, rich-but-taut Chardonnay like this Australia.
As to the wine, Brian is famously detail-focused, and there is great background info on the Tapanappa website. Well worth a look if you’re interested (I love that context. Throw winemaking notes at me wine world).
