Eight at the Gate Family Selection Chardonnay 2024
- 93
- $40
- Drink by: 2026-2031
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The Family Selection range is the team’s prestige collection. This is an impressive Chardonnay from Wrattonbully from a single vineyard, which undergoes barrel fermentation with native yeasts, and then a further eleven months maturation in a mix of new and older French oak barrels. The team employs lees stirring. Straw/gold in colour, this is an attractive style with notes of cashews and stone fruits, peaches and gentle oak integration that has worked extremely well. Appealing and robust, tropical notes are to the fore. The texture is supple and seductive and there is an attractive flick of acidity providing energy. This is a certain crowd pleaser for enjoying over the next four to five years.
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.
