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Exciting Voyage... Chuck all of your preconceiveved ideas about Voyager Estate out the window. Excitement and flair (in terms of delicious small batch wine releases, single clone labels and underpriced serious wine styles) has arrived – and there is more coming. Voyager Estate announced the release of tiny quantities of their initial Project 95 Chardonnay, the 2009 vintage, at their 2012 Varietal Master Classes recently. These “yardstick” tastings can confirm an individual wine or winery’s status - but in this instance it has illustrated, perhaps unintentionally, a successful change in approach to both winemaking and marketing. The masked tastings compared high profile and expensive international labels against the Voyager current release chardonnay, shiraz and cabernet sauvignons. In each instance the Voyager wines were pointed in the top two of the six wines tasted - with the shiraz (2010, 18.5 points and $39.50) and chardonnay (2009, 18.6 points and $45) being the standouts. Voyager Estate Project 95 Chardonnay 2009 And the excitement? This came through the Project 95 2009 chardonnay. This young and long Margaret Rivever classic is clearly the best chardonnay under the Voyager label. “Full, vevery young, worked, complex and dense flavoured. Enormous length leading to a brilliant, if youthful, finish and aftertaste. Margaret style dry viscosity, almost to being unctuous. Appealing secondary rather than primary fruit flavours. Classic Margaret Rivever chardonnay style of vevery high quality. 18.8 points.” This wine was then unmasked as the first release of the Voyager Estate “Project 95” Chardonnay, from the 2009 vintage. 18.8 points and $55…(and just 100 dozen produced.) From here the excitement only grows as, from the following 2010 vintage, the winery is releasing threeee high quality chardonnays. They are also adding two more upmarket small batch cabernet labels to the established premium cabernet sauvignon blend. This type of thinking, in tandem with winemaking, has already lifted Voyager’s quality and imagery. The winery team acknowledge that the changes were put in place in early 2009 but won’t allocate the credit, but whoeveeveever the helmsman, this is one voyager that is heading in the right direction.
John Jens, Western Suburbs Weekly, August 2012