Q Class Chardonnay 2022

This luxurious Chardonnay displays intense tropical fruit aromas with overtones of delicate honeysuckle & clementine, leading to layered flavours of baked apricot, macadamia and woody spice, with elegant acidity and a lingering finish.

The Q Class wines are only produced in exceptional years, in order to showcase the Simpsons’ hallmark of quality, luxury and finesse - combining unique terroir with meticulous viticulture and wine-making expertise.

This luxury pair of wines first came into fruition four years ago, spurred on by our “Best in Show” success at the Decanter World Wine Awards alongside being presented with the idyllic 2020 harvest conditions. We specially sourced an outstanding parcel of Chardonnay on the Railway Hill Vineyard site, offering the perfect opportunity to push the boundaries of world class still wine production even further.

The Simpsons’ Railway Hill Vineyard is so called because the Canterbury to Folkestone light railway passed through this site in the late 19th and first half of the 20th Century. The Q Class engines, which traversed this line, were powerful yet elegant, qualities that are exemplified in this wine.

It was fortuitous that the 2022 growing season was blessed by a high level of sunshine and marked by a distinct lack of rainfall which resulted in beautifully ripe fruit flavours. The chalk-rich soils provided the vines with enough moisture to ensure a bountiful harvest and generosity in the resultant wines. With such high quality, we were inspired to create the second vintage of the Q Class wines.

A specially selected parcel of Chardonnay clone 548 was hand-harvested on 18th October 2022. This date was carefully identified as the optimum window to harvest these grapes, when they were presenting opulent flavours combined with balanced acidity. Once pressed, the juice was left to settle for twelve hours.

The juice was racked to eight barrels with high levels of solids. Each barrel had its own unique properties, with six of the set crafted with new American, heavy-toasted oak and two made from one-year old French oak. The wine was then allowed to undergo alcoholic and malolactic fermentation.

Post alcoholic fermentation, the wine was aged for six months in barrel. Initially the lees were stirred bi-weekly, reducing to once per week in January 2023 and then on a monthly-basis for the remaining time in barrel. In Spring 2023 the wine was racked into stainless steel tanks ready for filtration and bottling into Magnums.