Tasting Notes 2009
Elston ’09 has a light golden colour with intense fresh pineapple and peach characters combining with lemon, oatmeal, cream and vanilla notes. It is a rich, complex wine balanced with fresh acidity, leading to a long finish. Elston ’09 will continue to evolve in bottle for five years from harvest, matching well with full flavoured dishes based on seafood, poultry and white meats, as well as soft ripened cheeses.
Elston ’09 is bottled with leading technology ‘DIAM’ corks. When the wine is well cellared, these provide consistent evolution for every bottle.
Technical Analysis
pH: 3.27
Total acidity as tartaric: 6.1g/l
Alcohol: 14%
Residual sugar: Dry
Winemaking
Each parcel was gently whole-cluster pressed, cold settled, and racked to new and seasoned French oak barrels for fermentation. The resulting wines remained in contact with their yeast lees while undergoing complete malolactic fermentation. In November 2009 the finest lots were selected for further maturation, spending a total of eleven months in barrel. The finished wines were then blended and bottled in March 2010.
Vineyards
Between 16 and 28 March 2009, the separate parcels of chardonnay grapes for Elston ’09 were hand harvested from their individual plots within Te Mata Estate’s vineyards.
Origin
Elston is named for Elston Hall in Nottinghamshire, the ancestral home of Charles Darwin’s family. Darwin’s ‘theory of natural selection’ forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory, the foundation of biology. The wyvern symbol of Elston Hall appears on the label.
