Moss Wood 2021 Chardonnay
| Wine Facts | |
|---|---|
| Median Harvest Date | 24th March, 2021 |
| Mean Harvest Ripeness | 13.4°Be |
| Yield | 4.98 t/ha |
| Growing Season Ave Temperature | 18.6⁰C |
| Number of hours accrued between 18 and 28⁰C | 1206 hours |
| Number of hours above 33⁰C | 21 hours |
| Days Elapsed between Flowering and Harvest | 137 days |
| Bottled | 3rd August, 2022 |
| Released | 1st September, 2022 |
| Alcohol | 14.00 % |
Wine Facts
-
Median Harvest Date
24th March, 2021
-
Harvest Ripeness
13.4°Be
-
Yield
4.89 t/ha
-
Weather Data
Growing season Ave Temperature - 18.6⁰C
Number of hours accrued between 18° and 28⁰C – 1206 hours
Number of hours above 33⁰C – 21 hours
-
Days Elapsed between Flowering and Harvest
137 days
-
Bottled
3rd August, 2022
-
Released
1st September, 2022
-
Alcohol
14.00%
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…
Vintage Notes
In some ways, it’s really quite easy to describe the 2020/21 growing season – long and cool. With an average temperature of 18.6°C, the Chardonnay vines ripened at a very leisurely pace indeed, taking 137 days to progress from flowering to harvest, basically 3 weeks longer than usual. When the fruit came off on the 24th March, it had the very pleasing ripeness of 13.4° Baume, slightly above average, despite
the mild conditions. All up, a very satisfying result. It must have been a pretty straightforward season, surely? Well, actually, no, not quite.
The fun started way back in October, 2019, when on the 24th, hail cut a swathe across the Moss Wood vineyard. That was almost 17 months prior to the 2021 vintage, so how can that have affected it? The answer can be seen in the yield, which at 4.89 tonnes per hectare, is down by 27%. More specifically, the bunch numbers were down by around 40%, because the hail damaged both the wood and the buds
that we had available for pruning in 2020 and which gave us the 2021 crop. It’s another reminder that a good hailstorm harms the crops for at least 2 years – the current season and the one following.
The vines can make up a yield deficit if they enjoy good flowering conditions. However, spring 2020 was fairly damp, with 13 of 40 days delivering 97mm of rain, not to mention 8 days when the temperature dropped below 8°C. As a result, those fewer bunches also weighed 20% less than usual.
Mother Nature settled down a bit through December and January, giving mild but benign conditions and we waited patiently for the vines to progress. At the end of the first week of February she changed her mind and gave us her “don’t get too comfortable” warning, delivering 88mm of rain and then a further 40mm at the beginning of March. No wonder farmers complain!
Despite all of the above, our spray program worked well, so we had no disease. In the end, we just needed to be patient and let the fruit reach full ripeness, which it did with ease.
Production Notes
As always at Moss Wood, the fruit was harvested by hand although
when we sent our Afghani pickers into the vineyard they weren’t too happy with the quantity on offer and there was much grumbling in the Hazari patois. Reassurance about the excellent quality didn’t seem to offer much solace.
The fruit was then delivered to the winery, sorted by hand and whole-bunch pressed. The must was settled and then seeded with multiple yeast strains for primary fermentation. On 3rd April 2021, at the halfway stage, the fermenting juice was racked to oak. All the barrels were 225 litre French oak and 50% were new.
Malolactic fermentation then took place and once completed, all the barrels were racked and blended in stainless steel, adjusted with SO2 and then the finished wine was returned to oak.
There it stayed until 18th July 2022 when all the barrels were again racked and blended in stainless steel. Fining trials were carried out but none improved the wine’s balance and so it was fined only with bentonite for protein stability. It was then cold stabilized and sterile filtered into bottle on 3rd August 2022.
TASTING NOTES
Colour and condition:
Medium straw hue with green tints. Bright condition.
Nose:
An absolutely typical Moss Wood Chardonnay showing all the vineyard’s classical features but with the added intensity from the mild season. There are bright fruit aromas of melon, peach and lime, with a complex background of roast cashews and almonds, crème caramel and honey. The final note is a soft, lightly toasty oak.
Palate:
The influence of the cool season also shows up nicely on the palate, where the wine displays full body but crisp acidity. This amplifies the bright peach and melon flavours, followed by caramel and a touch of oak. There is some tannin on the finish but they are nicely balanced by the fruit generosity.
Cellaring
Given the very high quality of the year, we strongly recommend the 2021 for cellaring and suggest a minimum of 10 years for some bottle development but it can be aged well beyond 20 years to reach full maturity. However, there is one proviso, it is very enjoyable now and will tempt even the most dedicated cellaring person.