Forest Hill 2020 Highbury Fields Chardonnay (Great Southern)

This is a distinctive wine from a distinctive place, deep in Western Australia's remote Great Southern region. It's a flinty, mineral, linear (borderline austere) style with lithe peach and melon fruit, toasted sesame seed, white spice, stone and seashell. The oak is there too but it's solidly in a supporting role. Laser-like acidity slices through a gently creamy texture in the mouth, that stony, salty minerality flowing through to the finish. Food friendly and very well priced, it could also cellar five to eight years, gaining fleshy, honeyed complexity (tasted 6/22). Christina Pickard