Tamburlaine 2008 Noble Chardonnay

Tamburlaine 2008 Noble Chardonnay
Tamburlaine is a certified organic winery in the Hunter Valley. On my trip to the Hunter Valley last year, I popped into this winery because they advertised winery tours, and I was interested to see some of the wine-making process. The tour was indeed very interesting, with a guy who was obviously keen on the whole organic side of the process, showing us the water and organic waste recycling processes used in the vineyard. We got to sample some still-fermenting white wine direct form one of the vats – the guide just opened a spigot at the bottom of a huge vat and let the juice pour into our hands. And there was a very cool fully-equipped chemistry lab, where they do all sorts of chemical analysis of the wines.

After the tour, I bought a bottle of this botrytis chardonnay dessert wine from the winery shop.

It’s sweet and jammy, beginning with apricot flavour, with a hint of banana. It develops into an orange taste, with the same bitterness of peel as the Jessica’s botrytis semillon we had last week. I found a good description for it on a wine site: orange marmalade – that mixture of sweet and bitter orange flavours that you get from really good marmalade. This wine also has a bit of that nutty, almost oaky kick that you’d expect from a chardonnay compared to a semillon, so it’s a bit heavier than a botrytis semillon. Very slight prickle of fermentation. Nice, but I think I prefer the semillon style.

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