Mountadam Chardonnay 1988 Wholesale Price $151.00 In the latest edition of his Australian Wine Guide, James Halliday challenges the wine lover either to agree with him or with noted American wine authority, Robert Parker, in his evaluation of several Mountadam wines. Parker’s marks are extremely high, Halliday’s extremely low. One of the wines Halliday discusses is the Mountadam Chardonnay 1988, to which he awards 55 points from 100, a score he says should indicate a wine at the lower end of the market, at $6 or less. In this case I give my unstinting support to Parker’s score. In his remarks, Halliday says that “the fruit has been entirely subjugated to making techniques designed to invest the wine with complexity”, which I am led to infer is delivered as a criticism. That being the case, is it wrong that many great white burgundies are made using skin contact with juice, barrel fermentation and maturation, malolactic fermentation and extended lees contact? All of these techniques are entirely designed to develop more complexity in the finished wine. I would be most surprised if Mr Halliday does not use all or most of these techniques in the making of his own chardonnay. Mountadam is an important Australian winery which is coming to terms with the application of traditional French winemaking techniques with the fruit from its own vineyard at High Eden Ridge. Winemaker Adam Wynn learned his craft in France, duxing his year at the University of Bordeaux. The superbly designed and flexible Mountadam winery also gives Wynn the facilities he needs to take full advantage of his vast technical knowledge and experience of wine and winemaking. His Chardonnay reflects Adam Wynns’ winemaking approach – to make a classically burgundian-styled wine of depth, complexity and cellaring potential. The style is uncompromisingly individual and usually requires several years to be seen at its best. The 1988 wine has a bright medium-pale straw colour with yellow tinges. The nose is rich, buttery and honeyed, with creamy malolactic flavours. There is no doubt that the palate is extractive and heavily-worked, but it is clean, generously-flavoured and balanced, so I find no problem there. Big textured barrel ferment and maturation characters give a chewy structure and the 30% secondary fermentation contributes softness and complexity. Acidity is soft and beautifully-integrated. It is a classic chardonnay and one that will develop in the bottle in a remarkable way, retaining its integrity without becoming excessively fat and blousy with age like most Australian wines made from this grape. Adam and David Wynn have every reason to be happy that they have a wine at all from the 1988 vintage, seeing that hail ripped through their vineyard, along with most others in their area, not long after budburst. Fortunately in this case a secondary shooting and a warm summer saw the satisfactory ripening and harvest of a smaller crop. I would serve this wine with stronger-flavoured seafoods, pork, turkey and white meat casseroles, for its fullness, flavour, richness and weight will take quite a beating.
