Irrewarra Chardonnay 2023
£37.95
The wine
Wonderfully fresh, with lemon and lime on the nose and real drive on the palate.
Chardonnay reflects the ground it grows on rather than imposing a flavour of its own, which is why where it is picked matters more than almost any other decision made about it. Irrewarra planted their vineyard in 2001 at the top of a north-facing slope, which in Australia is the aspect that catches the sun, on soils that drain hard and keep yields naturally low.
The producer
Irrewarra
View all Irrewarra winesIrrewarra is a project by Nick Farr, the winemaker behind By Farr's Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Branching out from Geelong, he went looking for a new frontier in Western Victoria, about 150 kilometres west of Melbourne near the small town that gives the wines their name. Irrewarra is an Aboriginal term meaning long spear throw, and nods to the area's heritage of traditional hunting and farming.
The landscape is agrarian and exposed, and it receives a great deal of rain: around 750 millimetres a year, which is generous by Australian standards and brings its own problems as well as its advantages. Cool, wet and windy is a difficult combination to farm, but it is also the combination that produces Pinot Noir and Chardonnay of genuine tension, and it is why the frontier was worth pursuing at all.
The winemaking follows the By Farr philosophy rather than departing from it: hand picking, indigenous-yeast fermentation, a proportion of whole bunches where the vintage supports it, and maturation in French oak with new wood kept in proportion to the fruit. The wines are made in small quantities and are recognisably from the same hand as the Geelong bottlings, but from a colder and more marginal place.
