2018 Melville Chardonnay Estate Clone 76 - Inox

Community Tasting Notes (3) Median Score: 90 points

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  5/13/2021 - TessaJC Likes this wine:

  All stainless. Very herbaceous nose. Yellow green color. Great legs. Incredibly smooth, delicate but substantive. Elegant, very refined. Great with sushi , burrata or even alone. Amazing

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  11/25/2019 - forceberry wrote: 83 Points

  12,8% alcohol. Only 480 cases made.
  
  Youthful, pale yellow-green color. Super-primary nose with candied aromas of pear drops, sweet apple juice, some herbal spice and a little bit of steely minerality. Smells more like Italian Pinot Grigio than Chardonnay. The wine is dry, crisp and fresh on the palate with medium body and very youthful flavors of pear drops, some acrid SO2, a little bit of apple juice, light lemony citrus fruits, a hint of banana marshmallows and a touch of steely minerality. The racy acidity makes the wine feel enjoyably focused and structure-driven. The finish is spicy, sharp and quite long with flavors of saline minerality, tart lemony citrus fruits, some tangy green apples, a little bit of primary pear drop character, light leesy notes of yeast and a hint of herbal spice.
  
  An enjoyably crisp and fresh Chardonnay that is simply too primary at the moment to be enjoyable. My score might seem harsh, but the wine is just quite unpleasant to me at the moment, coming across as just a candied crowdpleaser with its overtly primary fruit flavors. There is definitely a fresh and balanced wine underneath, but you really can't taste it behind all those sweet primary fruit flavors that make me think cheap Italian Pinot Grigio. I'd love to re-taste this wine after 3-4 years, because it feels like this is going to be good but it just needs more time. No need to hurry with this one.
  
  EDIT: Tasted the 2010 vintage of this on Oct/2021 - it was pretty lovely. This wine definitely needs more time.

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  6/8/2019 - srh Likes this wine:

  Winebar [4 Whites, 8 Reds, & 4 *shared* bottles] from 06/07/19] (Vintage Wines Ltd., San Diego, CA): "From the 1st 29 rows of Block A, a cold & inhospitable 1.8 acre section of extremely sandy soils on the W side of our estate planted to Clone 76. We love the marriage of this colder block & clone, as the grapes regularly reach proper acidity ripeness at lower sugars, an attribute we find ideal for our interpretation of s/s Chard. Upon immediate pressing, the juice is transferred into 2 small s/s tanks for a long, cold fermentation at an ave temp of 45°F to capture & enhance the fruit’s delicate nuances. The subsequent cold storage also prohibited the onset of malolactic fermentation. The wine then remained on its lees without any oak contact or disturbance for 5 mos." 460 cases produced & bottled in in late March, released Apr 2019.
  
  N: LOTS goin' on: Init apples giving way to FLOWERS with warmth/addt'l swirling. [Trying to parse this I *thought* I detected vanilla, toast, & even hints of butter which, given the winemaking, had to have been SOMETHING else. :( ]
  
  P: MF body; Very RNDISH entry with NICE, ALMOST swtish frt met by a very TANGY acidity which evolves into a LONG, almost lip-smackingly TANGY/swt (60:40) finish. An INTENSE style to drink through '22, + could well get even better through '19. FASCINATING stuff! 12.8% ABV; My EXC-/EXC. [Check with this vendor if interested in their very COMPETITIVE price!]

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