2022 Kumeu River Chardonnay Mate's Vineyard

This vineyard, planted in 1990, has just produced its 30th vintage. There is leafroll on the all-Mendoza clone for the moment but the hen-and-chicken size of berries adds concentration and a tad of astringency. This is a more sheltered site than the others so the grapes are riper and the new oak proportion is up to 30%. They want to keep the vineyard going despite the virus. Pale straw. The richest of the line-up. But still very transparent and lively. Chewy finish. A wine in line with late 20th-century ideal of Chardonnay while Hunting Hill is closer to what is sought in the early 21st century. (JR)

The nose on this 2022 Mate's Vineyard Chardonnay leads with candied bananas, pineapple husk, white peach and a hint of lychee, and the edges of the aromatics are feathered with preserved citrus, brine, curry leaf and apple skins. In the mouth, the wine is powered by supercharged fruit; it is crystalline in its way, an attribute that I have long-since associated with the Chardonnays from Kumeu River. The flavor is sapid and palate-staining, with just enough salt and savory spices in the fruit to make it super complex as well as powerful. It is precisely folded like origami, each crease in service of the overall shape.* A wine that offers much and assumes nothing. 13% alcohol, sealed under screw cap. *On a trip to Japan several years ago, I stayed in a house in the dramatically rural mountains of Hokkaido. We were snowed in and short of things to do, so we began attempting origami. One of the other people in the house, a local, was an origami master, and to assuage our inability to converse, his hands would move swiftly across the paper, deftly folding each sheet until we had a flock of penguins before us. Then a scarab beetle. A lion. There felt no limit to his capability or imagination. I think of him, and that day, relatively often in relation to wine.