Australian Chardonnay from Leeuwin Estate

TOASTY AND OAKY, THESE ARE THE KIND OF adjectives that make wine drinkers reach for their metaphorical guns, but they are the very things that make me love chardonnay. As a New World wine aficionado, I grew up drinking Australian and American, by sheer dint of where I had lived (Perth, Western Australia and then Los Angeles, California), and it was on a trip to Margaret River, Western Australia, in 2002 that I experienced my “Damascus moment” – the one where I finally saw the light.

On a visit to Leeuwin Estate on Stevens Road in Witchcliffe, I encountered the fabled Arts Series Margaret River chardonnay. I had never tasted anything like it and instantly understood why James Halliday, the venerable Australian critic once wrote that “Leewin Estate’s chardonnay is, in my opinion, Australia’s finest example. The fruit literally sings,” before going on to extol the virtues of its complex flavours marked by white peach, grapefruit and nectarine.

Over the years since, I’ve explored my love for Australian chardonnay in all sorts of ways – from the seriously upmarket (and very good) Penfolds Yattarna to less expensive (but no less intriguing) contenders like d’Arenberg’s The Olive Grove, from McLaren Vale and Adelaide Hills (its back label promising “intensity, balance and potential longevity”, and countless others offering that familiar pale-straw colour with a nose of peach, melon and sometimes even tropical fruit sorbet. Whatever the case, the palate must be piquantly citrus and there should exist a pleasantly lingering finish that encases the mouth and makes you want more.

For those criteria alone, I endured jibes from some of my wine collector friends when I stood firm in praising an American chardonnay, the 2000Vintner’s Reserve from Kendall-Jackson in Sonoma County, which I still think an amazing wine even if the winery doesn’t always provoke awe and wonder. Some people just don’t appreciate ma lolactic fermentation, which gives the wine its buttery mouthfeel.

Then there’s the issue of provenance. Chardonnay gets a bad rep when it hails from the New World, mainly because the French had staked out their turf for so long. Their chardonnay, made in Burgundy, became the model for everyone to follow and so Montrachet and Mersault were always the gold standards. Some still worship Chablis and the white wines of the Beaune, which offer more acidity and less fruit flavours, a style based on minerality (which the locals there so hyperbolically like to call gout de Pierre a fusil, which means tasting like gunflint).

But because I didn’t grow up on chardonnay from Chablis, I’m not sold on it. And it wasn’t until recently that I encountered an Australian chardonnay that challenged Leeuwin Estate by producing one that struck an admirable balance between the typically fruit-forward style of most New World chardonnays and the much drier and crisper style of Chablis. This came from yet another winery in Margaret River — Cape Mentelle, which I had visited back in 2002, though I remember only drinking its reds since its cabernet sauvignon is widely considered one of Australia’s best.

Again, it was James Halliday who pushed me; the 2005 Cape Mentelle chardonnay, he wrote in the new 2008 edition of his James Halliday Australian Wine Companion, is “a very elegant and precise wine; melon and nectarine fruit lead the way, with good acidity and oak balance and integration.” And so, when I was invited to lunch in July, with Jim White, the visiting Cape Mentally viticulturalist (the dude who oversees grape growth and vineyard management), I had to accept simply to discuss this with him.

White is a tall, bearded man with an affable personality that he underscored with a selfeffacing introduction (“Don’t mind me, I’m really just a farmer in a nice shirt”). He was surprisingly open about having been a naysayer once: “I used to be a diehard member of the ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) club,” he said as we drank his newly released and very fine 2006 chardonnay. “From the late 1 990s, there was a big backlash against chardonnays from Australia because they were too rich and heavy on the palate, with too much new oak. But the style in which we’ve beef making chardonnay at Cape Mentelle has turner me around. Of all the wines in our portfolio, it’s the wine that had made me re-address what we’re drinking. Our chardonnay has acidity without being overblown oak, because we’re trying to make a chardonnay that’s all about texture and minerality.

“Our 2006 chardonnay was quite a vintage. We’ve seen a progression in style at Cape Mentelle starting from 2000. We were looking for freshness and vibrancy in the wine. This wine has a small amount of oak influence – 30 per cen new oak and for only nine months, so the oak is in the background to accentuate rather than provide an individual characteristic in the wine. This wine is more about subtleties and nuances than obvious flavours.”

What about its competitors, the French and other Aussies? “I understand why PulignyMontrachet might be the standard people abide by, but we’re not trying to be that,” he replied. “We just try to make the chardonnay that best reflects our fruit, in the style that we like.”

“Leeuwin’s vineyards are not far from ours,” he added, “and we source our chardonnay from different vineyards throughout the area, essentially working with the same clonal materia – a lot of large and small berries that give a concentration of flavour. In the end, it’s the barre selection process and you have to critical about what goes into it. The fruit that comes in either makes our chardonnay or it makes our A$15 Georgiana, which is a blend of sauvignon blanc, semillon and chenin blanc with a small amount of chardonnay. In essence, that’s where my job comes in, to make sure the fruit is as high-quality as possible.

“I think our wines are comparable to Leeuwin in quality, but we obviously don’t have the history and accolades that they have received. That said, our 2006 has been the most written-up chardonnay in Australia and it’s made everyone’s top 10 wines of the year. So we think we’ve achieved something qualitatively and we’re starting to give Leeuwin a really good run for the money.”

A run for the money is what the wine game is all about, ultimately, since every vintage is different and each year’s releases bring forth new surprises. Isn’t that what the pleasure of any kind of discovery is all about? Chardonnay, being a wine that truly shows offthe skill of the winemaker, is the one that, for me, always paves the way. Can you be direct yet subtle at the same time? There’s a Zen to that that I love, and I remain enthralled by its seduction.

Source from Gerrie Lim

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