“Barrel selection” is one of those phrases that sounds expensive while meaning almost nothing, because the industry has never agreed on a definition of it. Nothing at all stops a producer walking into a cellar, spreading their arms wide and selecting the lot.

Jordan’s Nine Yards is what the phrase looks like when somebody takes it seriously. To build the 2024, winemaker Sjaak Nelson spent about two months tasting through roughly 240 barrels blind. Nineteen of them made the wine, which is eight percent, and that figure moves every year because the only thing deciding it is whether the barrel is good enough.

The fruit comes from Stellenbosch Kloof, where the vineyards are draped over two sides of a ridge and around a conical hill that faces very nearly every direction at once. Some Chardonnay rows curve around that hill, so one end of a row ripens differently from the other, and the team will sometimes harvest a single block in two passes. Keeping those parcels apart is what gives Sjaak something worth choosing between.

Nine Yards first appeared with the 2002 vintage. The name is the whole nine yards: everything the vineyard and the cellar have to give.

But of course, if you have yet to sign up for your Monthly HanDrinksSolo Wine Subscription then you’ll have to hunt this wine down in your own time. But until then, here are my tasting notes and some technical specs:

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The fruit for the 2024 came off east-facing vines in Stellenbosch Kloof, between 250 and 280 metres above sea level, on decomposed granite — Hutton and Glenrosa soils. Picking ran from 15 to 26 February 2024, at an average of 21.8° Balling.

The wine was fermented in 228-litre French oak barrels, 80% of them new and 20% second fill, from the Burgundian cooperages Damy, Chassin and Rousseau. A portion of it fermented naturally rather than with a selected yeast. It then spent nine months on the lees in barrel, with the barrels rolled regularly. What ends up in the glass is the roughly 8% of about 240 barrels that survived two months of blind tasting.

Alc. 12.5% | Sugar 1.8 g/L | Acid 5.7 g/L | pH 3.35 |