Claymore Voodoo Child Chardonnay 2024
- 92
- $25
- Drink by: 2025-2032
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Love the label – these guys so often offer fabulous labels, but fortunately, they also offer bottles with cracking wines within. After their own Chardonnay vineyard was hit by black frost in 2023, ‘grower friends’ provided the fruit to allow this wine to rejoin the portfolio. Partial malo and gentle French oak all contribute to the final product. Yellow gold in colour, the nose exhibits some smoky oak influences, along with peaches, a flick of citrus, stonefruits and ginger. There is good concentration throughout and the wine finishes with a slight sour/bitter almond note which helps to tie things together on the finish. A wine of good intensity and decent length for enjoying over the next two to four years, but well cellared examples will provide pleasure for several years beyond that.
Ken was born and bred in Brisbane, Queensland. He had a non-trendy, perfectly happy childhood, in a family convinced alcohol meant instant condemnation to Hades. But a break fishing on the Great Barrier Reef, and some good wine, started a serious obsession that eventually took over. It did not stop Ken being chastised later for drinking Pol champagne, disgusted he’d drink anything made by a Cambodian dictator. Now, Ken mostly writes on wine, champagne and spirits for various newspapers, magazines and books, but is perhaps best known for his work in The Courier Mail. He also has a little sideline writing on cigars, fishing, travel and food. When not writing, fly-fishing for trout in NZ or bonefish on the flats of Cuba, travelling or smoking cigars, he is no doubt following a variety of sporting teams – the occasionally glorious Queensland Reds rugby, the dysfunctional Washington Redskins, the dodgy Arsenal and especially revels in the world restored to its proper axis with the return of the Ashes to their rightful home.
