Neudorf Moutere Home Block Chardonnay 2023
£53.95
The wine
A wine of stature, history and elegance. Notes of oyster shell, cashew nuts and gentle oak are gracefully intertwined and come to a crescendo of complex purity. Although powerful, Home Block Moutere Chardonnay embodies restraint, poise and longevity, and is among the finest Chardonnay in New Zealand.
Home Block is the original Moutere planting from 1978 and the estate's flagship Chardonnay, widely held to be among the finest in New Zealand. Old vines on gravelly clay crop little and ripen evenly, and the wine is given full barrel fermentation and long lees ageing. Built to develop over a decade or more.
The producer
Neudorf
View all Neudorf winesTim and Judy Finn planted Neudorf in 1978, when Nelson had no wine industry to speak of, and they were among the pioneers who established that it could have one. Tim was a founding member of Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand. Their daughter Rosie now runs the estate with winemaker Todd Stevens.
The asset is the Moutere clay. Nelson sits at the top of the South Island, sunnier than most of New Zealand but cooled by the sea, and the Moutere hills are formed of ancient gravelly clay laid down by a long-vanished river system. Clay holds water through dry summers and restrains vigour, and vines rooted in it ripen slowly and evenly. The Home Block Chardonnay from those soils is widely held to be among the finest made in the country.
The range is tiered by site: Tiritiri for the wider Nelson wines, then the named Moutere blocks, Rosie's Block and Home Block and Tom's Block, each bottled separately. An amphora-fermented Chardonnay sits alongside them, which is an unusual thing to attempt at this level and works.
