Spring Seed Four O’Clock Chardonnay 2018

Spring Seed Four O’Clock Chardonnay is a vibrant, fresh Chardonnay with classic characters of stone fruit (nectarine and white peach) and citrus (lime and pink grapefruit) on the nose.

The palate reflects the gorgeous characters you find on the nose. Spring Seed Chardonnay is clean, fresh and has wonderful persistence and length.

We pick our Four O’clock Chardonnay at night, or early in the morning to keep the grapes cool and help jolly along the delicate nectarine and stone fruit characters and not lose them. Joch and the team make this wine in batches so we end up with different components when it comes time to put the wine together and bottle it. We get our Chardonnay from 3 different (organic) blocks on the vineyards, so each batch brings its own peculiarities of site with it to the mix.

We try our very hardest to keep the ferment away from oxygen, and the grapes undergo a cool ferment in stainless steel tanks. We don’t allow the wine to go through the secondary malolactic fermentation, because we want to protect the natural acidity.

2015 was a great white year in McLaren Vale (no shark pun intended) – the wine shows length, balance and freshness with citrus and stone fruit and a hint of pineapple. This wine shows so much flavour and character for a wine that is completely unoaked. ‘Four o’clock’ is pretty versatile, too; great as an aperitif (don’t serve too chilled) and wonderful with a range of foods: roast chicken and mushroom risotto is my standard food matching suggestion.

Spring Seed Wines are made from grapes lovingly grown in our family’s organic vineyard, located in the premium wine region of McLaren Vale, South Australia. The vineyard was established in the early 1970’s by Peter and Anthea Bosworth, and is now owned and run by their son Joch, who began the conversion to organic viticulture in 1995. The vines are fully certified ‘A’ grade organic by Australian Certified Organic, a process that takes four years and involves yearly audits and random sampling of produce.

The Spring Seed Wine labels are unashamedly inspired by vintage flower seed packets created at the turn of the last century. The colour, clarity and beauty of the original seed packets are quite remarkable. We chose three different flower images to adorn each one of our McLaren Vale wines, simply because they are quite lovely. The Aster Pinot Noir has the Aster (Callistephus chinensis), Foxglove (Digitalis pupurea) and Hollyhocks (Alcea rosea) labels.

Joch Bosworth also makes Battle of Bosworth wines using grapes from their organically grown and certified vineyards.