From the Rising vineyard and one other in the Upper Yarra. Whole bunches pressed, with the juice going straight into oak for natural fermentation. The two components each got nine months on lees before blending. Beautifully restrained yet complex chardonnay displaying a mix of meal, cashew and light stone fruit. Alluring palate delivers with subtle elegance and poise.

White nectarine, oatmeal, cashew, with a coverlet of spiced cedar oak. Light bodied, good flavour here, slightly into wheatgerm, but flinty and pulling tigher with some grapefruit and the like. Finish has a pleasant pithy bitterness and solid length. Excellent.

Umami. Mother's milk. Fatty: the first acids to hit the newborn tongue. Those fatty acids you find around isolvaleric aromas, which are often presignallers for calming human pheromones which then don't come. You need a real human mother to get real pheromones. But the very anticipation of them often leaves a frisson if not your actual fru-fru - you get these subliminal precursor signals sometimes as sidelines of secondary, or malo-lactic ferment, when bacteria, not yeast, convert the metallic natural grape acid, malic, to lactic, the softer acid of milk. All that - with oak-smoked bacon or cashews or something in the pan - wraps the aroma around me, by which time the acid of the end of the lovely thing starts to build. Which it does smooth and slow, drawing real fine chalky tannin with it. This is one fine reassuring wine.

The label has to set a record as boring, seemingly dirty (it's not), devoid of any pretence of useful information. The wine in the mouth is different story, strongly varietal, and reminiscent of Rising Vineyard, when back in 1988, I made one of Coldstream Hills' most awarded wines.

Umami. Mother's milk. Fatty: the first acids to hit the newborn tongue. Those fatty acids you find around isolvaleric aromas, which are often presignallers for calming human pheromones which then don't come. You need a real human mother to get real pheromones. But the very anticipation of them often leaves a frisson if not your actual fru-fru - you get these subliminal precursor signals sometimes as sidelines of secondary, or malo-lactic ferment, when bacteria, not yeast, convert the metallic natural grape acid, malic, to lactic, the softer acid of milk. All that - with oak-smoked bacon or cashews or something in the pan - wraps the aroma around me, by which time the acid of the end of the lovely thing starts to build. Which it does smooth and slow, drawing real fine chalky tannin with it. This is one fine reassuring wine.

The label has to set a record as boring, seemingly dirty (it's not), devoid of any pretence of useful information. The wine in the mouth is different story, strongly varietal, and reminiscent of Rising Vineyard, when back in 1988, I made one of Coldstream Hills' most awarded wines.

Light, bright yellow hue, with a subtle, discreet aroma and flavour recalling lime and grapefruit. The wine is very delicate and restrained, but clean and crisp, dry and refined with good length, balance and drinkability. A very fine, fruit-driven chardonnay.