Winemaker Notes
Expansive richness marries linear precision, forming this beautiful partnership. Meyer lemon custard, ginger, a mouthwatering salinity, finishing with hazelnut and granny smith apple through the long, vibrant finish. This has taken a few months to settle into itself and now that it has, it is simply stellar.
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2014 Dundee Hills Chardonnay was bottled in December 2015 after 15 months in wood. It has a taut minerally bouquet with white chocolate and praline scents infusing the citrus fruit, a second bottle showing more lime flower aromas. The palate is chalky on the entry with crisp acidity, fine tension here with a dab of white chocolate towards the refined, slightly saline finish that lingers. This has good potential, but it deserves another year in bottle.
One of the most popular and versatile white wine grapes, Chardonnay offers a wide range of flavors and styles depending on where it is grown and how it is made. While it tends to flourish in most environments, Chardonnay from its Burgundian homeland produces some of the most remarkable and longest lived examples. California produces both oaky, buttery styles and leaner, European-inspired wines. Somm Secret—The Burgundian subregion of Chablis, while typically using older oak barrels, produces a bright style similar to the unoaked style. Anyone who doesn't like oaky Chardonnay would likely enjoy Chablis.
Home of the first Pinot noir vineyard of the Willamette Valley, planted by David Lett of Eyrie Vineyard in 1966, today the Dundee Hills AVA remains the most densely planted AVA in the valley (and state). To its north sits the Chehalem Valley and to its south, runs the Willamette River. Within the region’s 12,500 acres, about 1,700 are planted to vine on predominantly basalt-based, volcanic, Jory soil.