Winemaker Notes
Aromas of green apple, buttery pie-crust, white flowers, fig and lime zest. Full-body with excellent balance on the palate, finishing with just enough structure.
Pair with fried chicken, pasta with cream cheese sauce, snack foods like chips or cheese puffs, or grilled white fish.
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
Rich and lively, this clean and focused white exudes a perfume of toasted coconut and cashew butter rimmed with lemon chiffon. Cedar meets minerality on the palate as toasted almond, fennel root, and crisp pear soften the tartness that arises from the finish of lemon peel. Fermented in stainless steel (100% malolactic) and aged six to eight months in 25% new oak.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Chardonnay features baked apples, hay and almonds on the nose with touches of banana cream and toast. The palate is light-bodied and juicy with toasty notes and spice-laced fruits, finishing long. It's a bit of an old-school style yet well-made and enjoyable.
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.
The largest and perhaps most varied of California’s wine-growing regions, the Central Coast produces a good majority of the state's wine. This vast California wine district stretches from San Francisco all the way to Santa Barbara along the coast, and reaches inland nearly all the way to the Central Valley.
Encompassing an extremely diverse array of climates, soil types and wine styles, it contains many smaller sub-AVAs, including San Francisco Bay, Monterey, the Santa Cruz Mountains, Paso Robles, Edna Valley, Santa Ynez Valley and Santa Maria Valley.
While the Central Coast California wine region could probably support almost any major grape varietiy, it is famous for a few Central Coast reds and whites. Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel are among the major ones. The Central Coast is home to many of the state's small, artisanal wineries crafting unique, high-quality wines, as well as larger producers also making exceptional wines.