Wildberry Estate

Margaret River Reserve Chardonnay 2022

Winemaker notes
Colour: Pale Gold
Bouquet: Our Reserve Chardonnay has a bright and lifted nose of sweet pastry, lemon curd and fleshy white stonefruit.
Palate: The palate displays a rich and layered mix of fresh stonefruit, citrus and intense vanilla bean flavours. A fine mineral thread ensures a wine of length and persistence.
Viticulture
The vineyard is planted on Karri loam gravel soils with underlying laterite. Vine rows run north south down a moderate north facing slope and are clone Gin-Gin with trellis structured to vertical shoot positioning. The vineyard is subject to the cool Southern Ocean breezes and ripens slowly, evenly and with naturally high acidity.
Winemaking
The fruit is handpicked then cooled before whole bunch pressing.
New and seasoned barrels are filled directly from the press to enhance complexity. Only the free run fraction is reserved with harder pressings separated to ensure a delicate and fine expression of the fruit in this wine.
The juice is left to ferment spontaneously and can take up to three weeks to ferment with some cooling at the height of ferment. After ferment the barrels are topped and gently stirred with inert gas protection monthly.
A small number of barrels were encouraged to finish malolactic fermentation to ameliorate the natural acidity. After nine months in barrel the wine is assembled in tank and aged on lees to further encourage complexity.