Evans & Tate Butterball Chardonnay

Taste

Mid-straw with a touch of green gold.

Juicy stone fruit, ripe melon and tinned pear with toasty oak, roasted spices and creamy, buttery notes.

Ripe Chardonnay characters of peach, tinned pears and ripe melon framed with toasty oak, roasted spices and creamy, buttery notes that flood the nose and mouth. A delicious rich and complex Chardonnay.

Why Do We Love This?

The vineyards that grow Chardonnay for our Butterball wine are located on sites in Margaret River that produce rich, ripe fruit flavours and low natural acid levels – all at a lower Baume (and subsequent alcohol level) than other locations. These attributes are critical to achieve the distinct Butterball style.

Following harvest, the grapes are chilled and softly pressed to liberate the juice – the pressings are added back to the free-run juice following oxidative handling to achieve the house style – a method rarely adopted in Western Australia. The cloudy juice is then fermented in a combination of new (22%) and used French oak barrels, barriques (225L) and puncheons (500L), and tank using a combination of wild fermentations and the CY3079 yeast used for naturally producing texture and savoury characters that marry well with the Evans & Tate Chardonnay style. Following this fermentation on solids, all of the batches that represent each vineyard are allowed to go through malolactic fermentation to full completion followed by maturation on yeast lees – with stirring of the lees done fortnightly to impart texture, balance, integration and complexity to the final wine. After this maturation period, the wine was blended and bottled under screwcap.