Mahi Marlborough Chardonnay 2020

Mahi Marlborough Chardonnay 2020French oak Textural Creamy Long & fresh This wine is a complex, textural wine that exhibits the slight creaminess on the mid palate that is the key characteristic of Chardonnay. The structure still retains acidity giving length and freshness. The aim for this Chardonnay is to retain a fresh structure with a complex palate. It is the vineyards, wild ferment and barrel characters that make up the complex nose and palate. This fruit comes from three

• French oak
• Textural
• Creamy
• Long & fresh

This wine is a complex, textural wine that exhibits the slight creaminess on the mid-palate that is the key characteristic of Chardonnay. The structure still retains acidity giving length and freshness.

The aim for this Chardonnay is to retain a fresh structure with a complex palate. It is the vineyards, wild-ferment and barrel characters that make up the complex nose and palate. This fruit comes from three vineyards; the Taylor Vineyard, which is in the Rapaura area, the Twin Valleys vineyard, which they have been working with since 2003 and a ten rows of Clone 1066 from the Mahi home block.

This year, which was the 20th vintage of Mahi, started two weeks later than 2019, on March the 20th, but finished only one day later, with their last lot of fruit coming in on April 9th, so for Mahi it was one of their most condensed vintages. A vintage they will never forget as picking and winemaking were partly dictated by Covid-19. While it was difficult to work the ‘virus vintage’ (and they are hoping that it will be the only one?!) the overall vintage was saved by having such great growing and picking weather. Rainfall through the period of December 21through to April 7 was only 20mm, which is a record low over that essential period for them and the temperatures through the season were the closest that they have had to the ‘normal’ for quite a few years. The cooler ripening compared to some recent warmer years has given them some intense fruit flavours, nice acidities, and elegant structures. Again, this year they had a great multi-cultural team with people from China, India, the US, Ireland, and NZ, and even though they didn’t see as much of each other as normal it worked well and is definitely not a vintage they will forget.

All of the vines were intensively hand-tended, and the grapes hand-picked and then taken to the winery for whole-cluster pressing. The resulting juice went straight to French oak barrels and fermented with indigenous yeast from the fruit. After fermentation the wine sat on yeast lees for eleven months prior to blending and bottling.