Winery & Vintage Info
Petaluma is committed to producing the very best wines from South Australia’s most distinguished viticultural areas.
The 2017 vintage in the Adelaide Hills was preceded by an old fashioned really cold wet winter, and then spring that never really sprung. It just kept raining. Then all hell broke loose in late September with wild storms lashing the whole state, culminating in a state-wide power blackout that left some regions without electricity for over a week.
It kept raining, and was cold right through early summer, including more flooding and hailstorms well into December. The remainder of the growing season was cool and wet, with a couple of welcome bursts of heat, but ended up being a very late vintage by recent standards.
We began picking Chardonnay on the 24th of March, finishing on the 28th of March. The fruit was transferred to our winery near Woodside in the Adelaide Hills. It was de-stemmed, crushed and chilled and the juice separated from skins and seeds in air bag tank presses. This juice was then cold settled for a few days, before racking the partially clarified juice into our chosen yeast culture to conduct the alcoholic fermentation.
This fermentation was conducted in a combination of stainless steel tanks (70%) and a French Oak barriques, hogsheads and puncheons. Towards the end of primary fermentation, the wines were inoculated with bacteria to encourage the malo-lactic fermentation (MLF), which is the conversion of hard malic acid to softer lactic acid. 100% of the wine underwent partial conversion.
The MLF also complexes the wine, adding creaminess and hints of butter.
All components were then matured in barrel for 8 months, slowly settled and clarified. In December the wines were emptied from oak and blended, cold settled, filtered and bottled on site in January 2018. Winery Notes
