2022 Tyrrell's Chardonnay Moon Mountain

Community Tasting Notes (1) Avg Score: 89 points

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  1/13/2024 - Rote Kappelle Likes this wine: 89 Points

  "I don't know much about wine, but I know what I like". This comment (and others of its kind) testifies to passion bounded by lack of confidence and led into a dry gulch of self-contentment. How many wine lovers have opened something to be confounded by a bastard (often one otherwise much loved) making comments like this?
  
  For me, reaction to comments like this have assisted my tendency to be an elitist wanker. Yet, I genuinely believe that there are times and places for commercial, unchallenging wines. There are more times and places not for them, of course, unless life is truly in a bad place. However, I often cringe at the idea of giving these wines any space, or recognition.
  
  On a sweaty, humid, refulgent day, I wanted a crisp, cold white wine but with the same exuberance as this tropical day; fight fire with fire. I wanted a Chardonnay. However, my personality is like that of Torquemada - I see heresy everywhere. For me the heresies of Chardonnay are many.
  
  The conversos are the wines that apparently have decided that the grape is 'old hat' and that Chardonnay really means fermented grapefruit juice. The Moriscos, of course are the buttery, oaky, low acid things of the past. Naturally, this makes up about 95% of all known Chardonnay. The heretical protestant Chardonnay equivalent I have yet to determine, but I know it will be there, insidious and working away.
  
  In a local bottle shop I worked through a range of wines, before an employed friar waddled up, all smiles and alleged sincerity and asked if he could help me. I was inclined to dismiss him, but such was my desperation I did not. Once I explained my Chardonnay requirements, he regarded me in much the way one would expect of the young fellow confronted by an older gentleman who announces "I am a sodomite and I am in search of a catamite. As I fix my eye on you, I think I have my solution."
  
  After he confessed that he belonged to the Moriscos I left him for the next auto da fe and found that this wine offered the only thing that offered hope for me. I did not require grand wine, just cold wine with some white peach/nectarine fruit, some acid cut (as God intended Chardonnay should be) and no coarse oak.
  
  And so it was. This wine gives what I want. Intensity is excellent. I mark it down to just under 'Excellent' because the finish perhaps does not follow through enough, but I think you will only see that if you look - it won't intrude on your pleasure. This is a wine made to be drunk now not thought about. But it works. It might not be at the level I usually look to, but it works on the day and I think these wines should be acknowledged - not elevated higher but not ignored either.
  
  There is some yeast lees creaminess and bread/brioche and on day 2 a slight suggestion of cantaloupe, but this is that rarity today, a Chardonnay that treads the line between the grapefruit Converso and the Morisco.

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