Lot 97 2004 Western Australia Chardonnay
Price: $13.00
- Vintage: 2004
- Appellation: Western Australia
- Grape: Chardonnay
- Alcohol by volume: 13.9%
- Production: 1,800 cases
- Release date: October 7, 2008
Lot 97 is also available at select retailers in California and Nevada.
Find the closest location using the Lot Locator.
Taste: Baked apple pie on the nose with notes of yeast and smoky gunflint (gunpowder?). Have you ever heard of botrytis? Clearly some of the clusters had botrytis and it shows adding additional sweetness and complexity to the nose. Carmel crust, apricot and toasty oak round out the mid-palate. Fantastic acidity and overall structure with, again, perfectly integrated oak – clearly, as with Lot 92, these lots come from a slightly warmer climate.
Cameron Confidential: Having fallen in love with Margaret River Chardonnay during our last trip to Australia, I started to poke around the region and see who might want to make some wine for us. One lead in particular lead us to an American owned grower group that, while they hadn’t any grapes or wine to sell, they did have an ultra-premium concept project of $30 chardonnay that hadn’t gotten much retail support – it was bottled in shiners would we take it off their hands? We were a bit skeptical of 2004 chardonnays but what the heck, we’ll try anything.
Glad we did – we were blown away at how these wines had held up, fresh and bright and drinking beautifully. If you have ever had Cullen Chardonnay then you will know what these wines aspire to: low yielding vines from the best blocks, carefully harvested and hand sorted before gentle crushing. Only free run juice went into the 50% new, 50% used top quality French oak for fermentation. The wines were aged 18 months in barrel and then only the best barrels chosen for the final blend.
We have two wines, a larger production, Lot 97 represented here and a small Lot of Margaret River Chardonnay. Lot 97 is a regional blend of sub-appellations Manjimup, Blackwood, and others. All of the wines were made in the EXACT same way (including use of new oak and ageing times) to preserve their typicity and make for the best blending components.
