Chardonnay Eden Valley 2021 – Peter Lehmann Hill & Valley

To produce the Chardonnay Eden Valley Peter Lehmann Hill & Valley 40% of the juice was drained directly into heavy toast French hogsheads allowing the natural flora on the grapes to initiate primary fermentation. The remaining 60% of the blend was cold-fermented in stainless-steel tanks using an inoculated yeast. The wine was matured for seven months on lees in with 20% of the total blend undergoing malolactic fermentation in barrel. Minimal finings were made during the process and the wine was cross-flow filtered just prior to bottling.

Peter Lehmann works with over 140 growers across the length and breadth of the Barossa Valley region, with access to over 750 individual vineyard sites. The grapes for this wine were sourced from their two top vineyards in the Eden Valley. The higher altitude of these sites and the shaly/schist nature of the soils produce high quality Chardonnay grapes.

Peter Lehmann started his own winery in 1979, partly as a means of helping with the glut of grapes then afflicting the Barossa. “I’ll take your grapes and turn them into wine,” he told the desperate growers, many of them conservative farmers of Silesian descent who regarded their old vines as part of their patrimony. “But I’ll only be able to pay you when I sell the wine.” They gratefully accepted. Without this deal, it is widely thought that the Barossa would have lost a large swathe of its old vines. The crisis passed, in large part thanks to Peter’s energy and vision, and the Lehmann winery became one of the Barossa’s – and Australia’s – outstanding wineries.

The “Hill & Valley” wines are made from fruit selected, often from single vineyards, in the Barossa Valley and from the higher reaches of the adjacent Eden Valley. The barrel-fermented Chardonnay, made from a vineyard in Wilton planted with new Dijon clones, is a bright and restrained example of the new style of Australian Chardonnay. The Riesling, also from the Eden Valley, is pristine and limey, while the Shiraz, made with fruit sourced from six different sub-districts of the Barossa, is lifted, vibrant and modern.