Geoff Merrill Reserve Chardonnay 2023
- 95
- $40
- Drink by: 2026-2031
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This is a fifty-five McLaren Vale and forty-five Coonawarra blend which comes from careful barrel selection each year. There’s richness here with a mix of stone fruit and roasted cashew characters. It’s had a reasonable hit of new French oak for nine months in a mix of hogsheads and puncheons, and yet the fruit has absorbed and managed it and harnessed it rather well. It’s a slightly older style Chardonnay in many ways, but with that fine, precise acidity, it just brings it forward into the modern domain. Really impressive wine over the next five to six years.
Ray Jordan has been writing about wine for more than 40 years. His first articles were published in the early issues of national wine magazine Winestate in the late 1970s when he worked in Sydney as a newspaper correspondent. From 1989 Ray wrote more than 3000 columns as a regular newspaper wine columnist. He currently writes a regular column for the special business publication Business News and is one of the main contributors to national wine platform Wine Pilot. In 2017 Ray co-authored The Way it Was – A History of The Early Days of the Margaret River Wine Industry and previously wrote Wine in the Blood: Australia’s Family Wine Estates, published in Mandarin and English. In 2011 Ray was awarded WA Wine Press Club Jack Mann Memorial Medal for his contribution to the WA wine industry. His love of wine is as strong as his love of the blues and tasting the thousands of wines that cross his bench each year allows him to indulge in both.
