Moss Wood 2014 Chardonnay
Wine Facts
| Median Harvest: | 20/02/2014 |
| Bottled: | 30/09/2015 |
| Released: | 18/11/2015 |
| Yield: | 7.38 t/ha |
| Baume: | 12.7⁰ Be |
| Alcohol: | 14.00% |
| Vintage Rating: | 10/10 |
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Moss Wood 2023 Chardonnay – Fergal Gleeson, Great Wine Blog
The nose tells you that you are in for something complex and delicious. A lightning rod of refreshing acid runs through this wine robed in lime, grapefruit and textured tannins. The Moss Wood house style is traditionally a rich and full bodied Wilyabrup Chardonnay. Perhaps it’s the cooler vintage…
Moss Wood 2023 Chardonnay – Ray Jordan, Ray Jordan Wine
One of the best chardies yet from Moss Wood, and that’s saying something with the quality of wines over the years. The nose is an immediately captivating combo of lemon curd, quince and cashew with just a subtle lift of zest. The palate has a sprightly energy with a crisp…
Moss Wood 2022 Chardonnay – Cassandra Charlick, Decanter
Creamy nougat, with a simmering, flinty minerality and lemon curd on the nose. There’s gentle yet opulent oak spice, a little char and pretty white florals lifting things up to craft an elegant and refined picture. In its youth the oak is still persistent, but time should nestle this further…
Moss Wood 2022 Chardonnay – Jane Faulkner – James Halliday, The Wine Companion
It falls into the big, rich and ripe camp. Bold flavours of dried pears and apricots with some apple compote dusted in warm spices and butter. Lashings of oak, cedary sweet and spicy, which is bolstering the palate even more. It’s a solid wine, and no doubt it has a…
Moss Wood 2021 Chardonnay – Jane Faulkner – James Halliday, The Wine Companion
Fans of bold, rich and ripe chardonnay will relish this wine. Off a cooler vintage, so thankfully there’s plenty of acidity here to offset those full flavours of ripe white peach, mango, and preserved lemon rind with loads of oak adding baking spices and woodsy characters. A hint of butterscotch,…
Moss Wood 2022 Chardonnay – Erin Larkin, The Wine Advocate
The 2022 Chardonnay leads with a nose redolent of white chocolate praline, roasted/salted/crushed cashews, orange oil, vanilla pod and wafer. In the mouth, the phenolics serve to almost balance the opulent fruit; this is a huge, pillowy wine of substance and volume. It tastes the way custard cooking on the…
Moss Wood Ribbon Vale 2023 Chardonnay – Ray Jordan, Ray Jordan Wine
A recent addition to the Moss Wood portfolio showing the great strides that have been taken in managing the Ribbon Vale vineyard. This is probably the best release yet. It was a superb season and its shows in a wine of elegance and refinement, yet with layered complexity and sophistication….
WA Wine Review 2024
Ray Jordan “Moss Wood is a family-owned wine company and a pioneer of the Margaret River region. Planted in 1969, Moss Wood is an important founding estate of Margaret River. Clare and Keith Mugford, as viticulturalists, winemakers and proprietors, have been tending the vineyard and making wine at Moss Wood…
Moss Wood 2022 Chardonnay – Ray Jordan, Ray Jordan Wine
Another cracking good chardonnay from Moss Wood. The aroma is immediately engaging with a floral lemon scent and a slight vanilla bean essence. Subtle cut lime and pear edge into add some further complexity. The palate is a powerful statement with a deeply intense creamy stone fruit and edgy lemon…
Moss Wood 2022 Chardonnay – Fergal Gleeson, Great Wine Blog
The Moss Wood house style is rich and at the complex end of the Margaret River spectrum. Sourced from the historic Wilyabrup estate vineyard, there is no attempt to force a lean or mineral Chardonnay from the site. It’s full bodied but shapely. Lime and nectarine fruit flavours, marmalade and…
Tasting Notes
The wine has a medium to deep straw colour and is in bright condition.
The nose has the full complement of Moss Wood Chardonnay fruit aromas - limes, peaches, marmalade, roast almond and malt biscuit. The extended barrel age and malolactic fermentation has added in some toasty, spicy oak and interesting bread and caramel notes. Complex, indeed.
The same themes continue on the palate, with full body and high acidity combining with peach, nut and cheese flavours, providing generosity and length. The finish has some toasty oak, with some tannin evident.
Vintage Notes
If we wanted to reproduce an ideal growing season for chardonnay, we’d almost certainly use 2013/14 as the blueprint where just about everything worked in our favour. We had good rain during spring that fell at the right time, so there was no disruption to the flowering. Our management of the vineyard worked well and we avoided disease and bird damage and all of this combined to give us crop levels of slightly above average.
Most importantly, Mother Nature smiled on us, giving us literally day after day of good ripening conditions and the numbers tell the story. In the end, chardonnay enjoyed a luxurious 1046 hours between 18 and 28⁰C, when all it needs is 700 to ripen the crop. In addition, it received 29 hours above 33⁰C, enough to ensure consistent ripe fruit characters but way below our designated excess extreme heat level of 80 hours. All up, we picked some of the best Chardonnay fruit ever at 12.7⁰ Baume on 20th February.
Production Notes
After a positive start in the vineyard, we dared not make any mistakes and set about carefully shepherding our new baby through the winemaking process.
The fruit was whole bunch pressed and the juice was captured and settled in stainless steel tanks for 48 hours. The clear juice was racked off, with a light inclusion of solids and fermentation commenced in stainless steel, using pure yeast cultures. Once successfully under way the fermenting juice was then racked to barrel. All casks were 228 litre French oak and 43% of them were new.
Moss Wood has 5 individual chardonnay vineyards, all of which ripen at slightly different times and so this wine typically starts its life as at least 3 individual batches. When they all finish fermentation, they are blended together and returned to barrel as a finished wine and this was carried out on 17th March 2015. Next, it underwent a full malolactic fermentation, whereupon it was racked once more, adjusted with tartaric acid and sulphur dioxide and returned to barrel.
It stayed in oak until 8th September 2015, giving the blended wine a total 20 months. Fining was with bentonite for protein stability and then it was sterile filtered and bottled on 30th September, 2015.
Cellaring Notes
As usual for Moss Wood Chardonnay, it is a very drinkable youngster and can be enjoyed now. However, it is definitely a wine for the cellaring enthusiast and will begin to show some bottle development by 10 years of age. For those who like their chardonnays to mature to the point where the secondary characters are dominant, they should wait until the wine is at least 20 years old.