Neudorf Rosie’s Block Amphora Chardonnay 2023
£30.75
The wine
Fermented entirely in amphora, an exploration of the Moutere clays. This plays with exquisite tension between fruit concentration and rockpool minerality, between intriguing flint and weighty mouthfeel. Graceful and free, unshackled by traditional expectations of Chardonnay, and captivating for it.
Fermented entirely in amphora, which is a bold thing to attempt with Chardonnay at this level. Clay allows slow oxygen exchange in the way a barrel does but contributes no flavour of its own, so the wine shows the Moutere clay and the fruit rather than oak. Unusual, and considerably more successful than the idea sounds.
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.
