Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2012 Chardonnay Ft. Ross/Seaview is a brilliant example of Sonoma Coast Chardonnay, showing notes of honeysuckle, white peach, unbuttered popcorn, spring flowers and white currants. Complex and medium to full-bodied with a delicate influence of oak, this beauty should drink nicely for 5-7 years, perhaps longer.
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Wine Spectator
Well-oaked, with jazzy vanilla, cream and buttery notes that expand and extend the core of citrus, green apple and honeydew flavors, giving this an enticing aftertaste of smoky vanillin. Drink now.
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.
On the far western edge of the larger Sonoma Coast appellation, the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA hugs right up against the Pacific coast. Vineyards, planted at rugged elevations between 920 to 1,800 feet, occupy only two percent of the total land in the AVA. Fort Ross-Seaview growers believe that the region boasts an ideal mix of sunshine, cool air and beneficial stress for producing high quality Chardonnay and Pinot noir.