Oxford Landing 2011 Chardonnay

This is the bottle that Dad was most interested in us trying:

"The Oxford Landing Chardonnay, I bought once and loved it. It was completely without oak and had residual acidity as in the French style of wine making with that grape. I bought it again about a year later and it was a mess. There was a lot of residual sugar and no acidity. I believe they had introduced malolactic fermentation to the wine as well, or perhaps added some of the fake butter taste to it. I haven't tasted it since. Try it for me and let me know what you think. " 

The cheap and tasty wine list suggested a 2010, but the kind girl at the liquor store explained that with wines at this price point, they do not bother noting the years. The 2011 is what they sell now, so that is what we drank.

The dinner had arrived, and it was splendid:

• Daal Amritsari - Yellow lentils cooked to perfection originally made famous outside of the Golden Temple.
• Chana Saag - We have taken the chick peas and mixed it in our spinach sauce.
• Kashmiri Chicken - Chicken cooked with onions, green peppers, garlic, ginger & mango pulp.
• Bloody awesome lamb of some sort 

(from Indian Oven)

It is unfair to ask wine to compete with this, and perhaps we should have been drinking beer. but until I get a cheap and tasty beer list, wine is what we have.

And so for the Oxford Landing. It smelled like things!

• Fermented pineapple
• Meringue

And tasted like things:

• Citrus peel
• Melon rind
• Compost bin!

It really did smell delicious.

The tasting did go a little wonky, one attempt to aerate it led to the conclusion that this wine does not gargle well. 

It was a teensy bit pretentious, as it 'resonated with a palate', and had 'an aura of smugness' (that may have been me, not the wine, hard to tell.) 

We had a great deal of discussion about the label. It had a little peel-off bit that you could take to help you remember the wine - this seems a bit desperate. And it claimed that the wine had notes of resin. We couldn't smell or taste resin, and the wine seemed no more or less sticky than other wine, so were they trying to trick us? But the biggest concern was the note saying 'Suitable for vegetarians.' Right under the sentimental blurb implying that the original wine maker dudes are buried in the vineyard, and stating outright that the wine is full of characters. Does that still strictly qualify as vegetarian?

We didn't notice any of the oak or nasty butter that bothered Daddy, but it wasn't very acidic.

Oxford Landing
Chardonnay
2011
South Australia
BC Liquor Stores
$12.99
Over all: I can't remember!