Elston '14

Tasting Notes 2014

Pale primrose yellow, Elston ’14 is stunning. An aroma of candied lemon and citrus blossom, then an explosion of peach crumble, apricot, lemon and nectarine. Notes of grapefruit and honey play through a soft, round palate of lemon custard and vanilla. With fabulous concentration and complexity, this is long, pure, fresh chardonnay with superb potential. 

Elston ‘14 is bottled with leading technology ‘DIAM’ corks. These are produced using a liquid form of carbon dioxide which eliminates any possibility of cork taint and, when the wine is well cellared, they provide consistent evolution for every bottle. Elston ’14 will continue to develop in bottle for five years from harvest.

Technical Analysis

pH: 3.30
Total acidity as tartaric: 6.5g/l
Alcohol: 13.5%
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 malolactic fermentation. The finest lots were selected for further maturation, spending a total of eleven months in barrel. The finished wine was bottled in March 2015.

Vineyards

The superb quality of the 2014 vintage was immediately apparent in the fully ripe grapes that were hand-harvested from their separate, individual plots within Te Mata Estate’s vineyards between 3 and 13 March 2014.

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.

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