Chardonnay has been growing in Mudgee since 1930 – but amazingly, nobody knew it for about 40 years! The story begins at Craigmoor Wines, wherein 1930, cuttings of several unidentified white grapevines were planted. At the time, local wine drinkers were a lot less sophisticated, and these vines were used to produce what was sold simply as a dry white wine.
In around 1960, one of their employees named Alf Kurtz decided to start his own winery, and asked if he could have cuttings from one type of the mystery white vines he had taken a fancy to, believing they produced a particularly high quality wine. He planted about a quarter of an acre of these vines and started producing a single varietal wine from it. Not knowing what it truly was, he called it White Pineau.
A few years later, Alf found some men in his vineyard. Turns out they were scientists from CSIRO, and a visiting French professor who was a specialist in identifying different types of grapevines. They had been intrigued by some of his vines and decided to have a closer look. Alf invited them back to his winery for a tasting before they continued on their way. Only later did he find out that they had determined that his vines were actually Chardonnay – and a rare disease-free example at that! Both Alf and Craigmoor released wines correctly labelled as Chardonnay for the first time in the early 1970s, and cuttings from these Mudgee vines were used for many plantings of Chardonnay across Australia in the 1970s.
