Mountadam Marble Hill Chardonnay 2020

The story of Marble Hill began in the 1860s when South Australian landowner and parliamentarian Sir Samuel Davenport was given a cutting of “chardonuet” by a French horticulturist. Somehow, and history is not clear on the sequence of events that led to this, the cutting came to be grown in the South Australian Governor’s summer residence, a property known as Marble Hill in the Adelaide Hills. The vines eventually came to the attention of renowned wine industry pioneer David Wynn, who took a cutting and propagated further vines at a nursery in Adelaide. He planted them out on a beautiful elevated site on his Mountadam vineyard in 1972, making these the oldest cool climate chardonnay vines in Australia. It is believed that this clone, which he called Marble Hill, no longer exists anywhere else in the world – the Marble Hill property was eventually destroyed by fire and in France, from where the clone originated, the vineyards were wiped out by phylloxera.