Elena Walch Beyond the Clouds 2018

Cellar for up to 10 years. Serve chilled.

Elena Walch was an architect when she married Werner Walch whose family were the largest vineyard owners in Italy’s northern Alto Adige region. Today Elena is known as one of the region’s finest producers, making wine under her own name while sharing the grape harvest and winery with her husband who bottles under his name. Elena specialises in artisanal production with a high level of attention to detail and produces a small number of cases each year.

Elena’s Beyond The Clouds is her flagship wine made predominantly from Chardonnay from the prized Castel Ringberg estate vineyard. The varieties are pressed and fermented together in new French oak barrels where the young wine is left to mature for 10 months before bottling with regular stirring of the lees or yeast. The wine is then aged for another 6 months in the bottle before release.

The result is a powerful, intensely-flavoured white wine with excellent ageing potential. The nose opens with enchanting notes of white peach, pineapple and subtle white flowers while the first sip reveals bright tropical fruit, stone fruit and hints of toast. The rich texture, well-built structure and long finish will help this magnificent Italian white to age gracefully in the cellar over the next decade or so.