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.

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.

This year, our 23rd, was again distinctive and it was a late start for us and was a longer vintage. Starting on March the 15th the weather stayed very settled through the vintage period and allowed us to pick as we like until we finished on April 18th. Smaller crops always helps and after a warm period after Christmas the temperatures cooled down to ‘average’ and it served to maintain fruit flavours while ripening the fruit. A great team from seven nations worked so well together and we are super happy with the eventual wines.

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, (19%) which is in the Rapaura area, the Twin Valleys vineyard (75%), which we have been working with since 2003 and a ten rows of Clone 1066 (6%) 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. Only using the free-run portion, the resulting juice went straight to French oak barrels without any additions and fermented with indigenous yeast from the various vineyards. After fermentation the wine sat on yeast lees for eleven months prior to blending and bottling.