• French oak
• Textural
• Fresh acidity
• Creamy

We love Chardonnay! This wine is a complex, textural wine that exhibits the slight creaminess on the mid-palate that is the key characteristic of Chardonnay. The structure still retains acidity giving length and freshness.

This year, our 22nd, was again distinctive and again it was early and some serious rainfall at veraison meant that the berries were bigger this year, so the crops were slightly higher. Starting on March the 10th we harvested quickly and finished the earliest ever. It was not a hot vintage, so the flavours were retained, but we felt the grapes were fragile so picked quickly as things ripened. We saw early on that it was a bigger year and, with cooler easterlies winds predominating, we decided to drop some bunches early, up to 18 bunches a vine in one parcel!? This really helped as the vines managed to get the remaining bunches ripe and we were happy with the health of the fruit. April saved us also as it only had 19% of normal rainfall and we nearly had the last month of no rain, which was so good. Slightly lower sugars this year means the wine is perhaps more elegant and refined but it still shows the texture we are looking for.

The aim for this Chardonnay is to retain a fresh structure with a complex palate. It is the vineyards, wild-ferment and barrel characters that make up the complex nose and palate. This fruit comes from three vineyards; the Taylor Vineyard, which is in the Rapaura area, the Twin Valleys vineyard, which we have been working with since 2003 and a ten rows of Clone 1066 from the Mahi home block. All of the vines were intensively hand-tended, and the grapes hand-picked and then taken to the winery for whole-cluster pressing. The resulting juice went straight to French oak barrels and fermented with indigenous yeast from the fruit. After fermentation the wine sat on yeast lees for eleven months prior to blending and bottling.

Mahi, meaning ‘our work, our craft’, began in 2001, fulfilling a dream of ours. After 15 vintages it was time to do our own thing. With a strong focus on single-vineyard wines, and now backed up by a series of premium regional wines from Marlborough, the idea behind Mahi is to respect and promote the individuality of the various vineyards. The Mahi symbol represents the strength, life, and growth of the native New Zealand frond (fern), with the understanding that wine should never be rushed to bottle, respecting its ability to evolve naturally over time.