Tapanappa Tiers Vineyard Chardonnay 2023

Why is this Wine so Yummy?

Of the past four wonderful vintages in Tiers Vineyard, 2023 was the coldest. The colour of 2023 Tiers is pale lemon. The aroma displays characters reflective of this cool year with subtle, aromatic apple and pear with honey and lemon, complexed by yeast, cashew and oak spice. The flavour is intense and fresh with a lingering acidity. The taut edge of acid and the slight astringency and bitterness of the grapefruit finish, perfectly offset the fruit and texture that are the hallmarks of fruit from this vineyard. 2023 Tiers Chardonnay is “a very cool vintage of a unique wine defined by the truly distinguished Tiers Vineyard terroir”.

Brian Croser

About Tapanappa

Tapanappa is the 21st century chapter of an adventure that pioneered the modern era of the Adelaide Hills wine region.

Tapanappa is the name that Brian Croser has given to his ongoing family-owned, fine-wine enterprise based in the Piccadilly Valley where it began more than 40 years ago as Petaluma.

After a storied history as the first and one of the finest of the Adelaide Hills wine producers, Petaluma was taken over dramatically by corporate giant Lion Nathan in 2001, although the Crosers retained ownership of their family home and their beloved Tiers Chardonnay vineyard at the foundation winery site.

Begin again

The next year, determined in their vision to continue creating great Australian wines, Brian and Ann Croser established Tapanappa in partnership with long-time friends and business collaborators, Bollinger of Champagne and the Cazes family of Lynch Bages in Bordeaux’s Pauillac appellation.The French partners stayed with Tapanappa until 2014, remaining firm friends and continuing as importers in key global markets.

In 2014, after protracted negotiations with Petaluma’s corporate owners, the Croser family regained control of the PiccadillyValley winery and cellars in time to renovate it for the 2015 vintage and to move with renewed vigour into Tapanappa’s fine wine future.

Today Tapanappa has evolved into a complete family fine wine company from vineyard to market. It is managed by Brian’s daughter Lucy and husband Xavier Bizot, while another Croser son-in-law, Sam Barlow, looks after the winery.  Tapanappa’s portfolio of wines is distributed in Australia by Terroir Selections, founded and operated by Xavier and Lucy.

Why Tapanappa

The name “Tapanappa” is inspired by the 550-million-year-old geological formation that underlies the Fleurieu Peninsula where the Croser family have a coastal property and their newest vineyard, Foggy Hill.

The word Tapanappa is derived from the local aboriginal language, implying “sticking to the path”. This is exactly the philosophy Brian Croser has employed in selecting his Distinguished Sites  matching the climate, soil and geology of a location to the right varieties and fastidiously managing the vineyard to make unique Australian “terroir” driven wines.

In the Vineayd

Since its foundation in 2002, Tapanappa has expanded its vineyards beyond the Piccadilly Valley as Brian adhered to the core philosophy that continues to drive his winemaking practice, defined by the concept of Distinguished Sites.

The “distinguished site” concept has now been applied to two more South Australia regions adding to the repertoire of  terroir-defined wines of Tapanappa’s highly respected, fine-wine portfolio.

Those three Distinguished Sites are:

The original Tiers Vineyard planted with Chardonnay in the Piccadilly Valley in 1979

Foggy Hill Vineyard planted with Pinot Noir at Parawa on the Fleurieu Peninsula in 2003

Whalebone Vineyard planted with Cabernet and associated varieties in Wrattonbully in 1974

The Croser family has invested significantly in refining the viticulture of these three distinguished vineyard sites.

The old vines at the Tiers and Whalebone vineyards have been restructured and re-trellised. New vineyards have been planted with superior clones on rootstocks at very close spacing, inspired by the traditional European formula 1.5 metres by 1.5 metres with the vines only 0.5 metres above the soil surface.

As they did with the Piccadilly Valley in 1979, the Croser family has pioneered a new wine region at Parawa on the Fleurieu Peninsula by planting Dijon clones of Pinot Noir on rootstocks at the close-spaced Foggy Hill Vineyard.

At each of these vineyards, Brian and his team have keenly identified the components of terroir and nurtured their influence in the grape growing and winemaking process to bring to the bottle the finest expression of each site.

The Tiers Vineyard

The Tiers vineyard is in the coolest and wettest location in South Australia, the Piccadilly Valley.

It is perfectly suited to Chardonnay being a closely matched homo-clime of Burgundy and especially the southern end of the Cotes de Beaune where the great Montrachets and Mersault Chardonnays are grown.

The soil of the Tiers Vineyard is unique in the Adelaide Hills being derived from the 1.6 billion years-old basement rocks of the Barossa complex, lifted to the surface by a fault at the edge of the Tiers Vineyard. The rest of the Piccadilly Valley has soils derived from the much younger, 700 to 800 million years-old, Burra group.

The Tiers Vineyard tilts gently to the north and east in a sheltered valley surrounded by forest forming a true “clos” environment.

The aspect takes best advantage of the waning autumn sun in the northern sky, extracting the last rays of ripening energy at the cool end of the harvest.

It is planted on an intensive vine regime and managed fastidiously by hand on a vine-by-vine basis. The Tiers vines are now over 40 years old and in perfect balance with their environment at the low crop level of 5 tonnes/hectare. The vines are slowly devigorating with age as expected and the grape quality is ever increasing minutely year by year.

The Croser family planted the first vines in the Tiers Vineyard in 1979, the first vineyard planted in the Adelaide Hills region in the 20th century.

The Tiers Vineyard is in the centre of the Adelaide Hills in the Piccadilly Valley under the Eastern shadow of Mount Lofty. The Piccadilly Valley is one of the few genuine homo-climes of Burgundy in Australia. When Brian and Ann Croser took their young family to the Piccadilly Valley in 1978 to establish the Petaluma winery, they purchased the 7-hectare property they named The Tiers as their home and the site for a revolutionary Chardonnay vineyard.

The property was named The Tiers in recognition of the name the 1836 pioneers gave to the central Adelaide Hills in as seen from the Adelaide plain. The original name for the Piccadilly Valley was The Tiers Valley. 3 hectares of adjacent low-lying land was purchased for the establishment of the Petaluma winery.

The first planting of The Tiers Vineyard was with the Davis Chardonnay clone OF, a heat-treated version of the Davis clone 1 now known in Australia as the Gingin clone. Davis Chardonnay 1 was exported to Western Australia in 1954 by Professor Harold Olmo, Brian’s viticulture Professor at the University of California, Davis.
The second planting at The Tiers in 1980 was supposed to be OF clone but the Australian Wine Research Institute has since typed it as an unknown clone, not related to the Davis imports or any other of the clones they examined. It may well have arrived from the eastern states in the rush of Chardonnay plantings of the early 1980’s and may relate to some of the first introductions of Chardonnay to New South Wales in the early to mid 1800’s. It is a unique clone!

More on that story later.

In 1979 The Tiers Vineyard was a radical vineyard by Australian standards planted on a close spacing regime of 2.1 meters between rows and 1.5 meters between plants in the row (3175 vines/hectare), then the closest spaced vineyard on the Australian mainland. The vines are hand pruned to two canes of 8 buds and 2 replacement spurs of 2 buds, 20 buds/vine and 63,500 buds/hectare. As the vines have aged their vigour has declined and over 40 years the number of buds per hectare has dropped from 90,000 to 63,500 even as grape quality has inexorably increased.

Foliage wires hold the vine canopy vertically, a further revolutionary aspect of The Tiers vineyard design in 1979.

Traditionally the Piccadilly Valley was considered too cool and wet for grape growing and The Tiers Vineyard design was viewed by onlookers as too expensive to establish and too costly to operate for an economic return.

This scepticism was at first justified when the first flowerings of the new Tiers Vineyard failed in 1983 and 1984 because of what later proved to be unusually cold and windy conditions at flowering time in late November, in both years. Since then, failure of fruit set at flowering has been an infrequent event.

The key to unlocking the quality potential of the Tiers terroir is the 63,500 buds/hectare to achieve proper vine balance and control of vigour in the benign Piccadilly Valley environment. The close row spacing allows those buds to be dispersed along enough fruiting wire to create an open canopy and establish sufficient leaf area to fully ripen the 1.6 kilograms of fruit/vine, representing a crop level of 5 tonnes/hectare.

Tiers 1.5m

In 2003 the Croser family removed 1.3 hectares of the original Tiers Vineyard Chardonnay, that was planted in 1979 in the Piccadilly Valley as the first Adelaide Hills vineyard. The area was replanted with the French Bernard clones 76 and 95 on rootstocks on very close 1.5 metre row spacing (4,444 vines/hectare) with the fruiting wire at only 0.5 metres above the ground. This unique vineyard section produces earlier ripening, fuller flavoured Chardonnay than the 1981 old vine Chardonnay, on it’s own roots across the centre road in Tiers Vineyard. So unique is this small area of Chardonnay that we made the decision to bottle it separately from the 2015 vintage onwards.

These fruit from these vines is used to make Tapanappa Tiers 1.5m Chardonnay.

The 2023 Vintage at Tapanappa

Like the 2021 and 2022 vintages before it, the 2023 vintage in the Piccadilly Valley was “near perfect” and is the coolest of the three. The 2023 vintage was marginally cooler, with 1093C-days, than the long-term average of 1135C-days. We have now had four successive cooler vintages (2020 to 2023) after the near unrelenting warmth of the previous decade of vintages.

The Chardonnay crop was very modest in the Tiers 1.5M block at 6 tonnes/hectare. The Chardonnay grapes in the 20-year-old Tiers 1.5M Vineyard ripened in still and cool air, sunny conditions, ideal autumnal weather just before a rain event.

Tiers Vineyard 1.5M yielded up its exceptional quality fruit on the 12^th and 13^th of April, two weeks later than average, one of the latest ever.

In the Winery

The hand harvested Chardonnay grapes from the Tiers Vineyard old block (1979), were chilled in trays in the cold-room to 2C.

The cold grapes were tipped into our gentle air-bag presses and the whole fruit pressed juice was pumped to tank before being gravitated to French oak barriques (one third new) for fermentation. The fermentation lasted two months in the cool autumn conditions.

The wine was barrel aged on full lees until December of 2022 when it was clear racked from barrique and bottled in January of 2023.

In-bottle analysis:

pH 3.12

Total Acid 8.47 g/L

Alcohol 12.9%

Winemaker BRIAN CROSER

“Tiers Chardonnay is a unique expression of a noble variety and a distinguished site vineyard.”

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