Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 Chardonnay Casteel is complex and alluring, offering dynamic aromas and flavors as it unfurls with oxygen over several days. The nose offers lemon peel and panna cotta, spicy, honeyed undertones and streaks of flint. The medium-bodied palate is satiny and expansive with impressively concentrated, slightly exotic fruit driven by focused acidity, and just enough smoky reduction adds even more complexity to its generous fruit. Year after year, the Casteel is one of the best Chardonnays coming out of Oregon, and this 2021 is especially gorgeous!
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Jeb Dunnuck
The bright yellow straw-hued 2021 Chardonnay Casteel is elegant and floral, with a more refined perfume of lemongrass, delicate baking spice, green apple, and fennel. Silky and refined, a note of citrus oils coats the palate with a spine of fresh acidity underneath, and it has a long finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
The Casteel’s aromatic combination of papaya, blood orange and macadamia nuts is almost as good as a nice suntan. Then a wave of pineapple, lime and orange sorbet flavors calls out for a cry of “cowabunga.” Zingy acidity of the puckering variety keeps things lively.
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Wine Spectator
Rich and polished, with multilayered flavors of lemon tart and apple that take on caramel, orange blossom and spice hints on the lingering finish. Drink now through 2023. 235 cases made.
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.
Running north to south, adjacent to the Willamette River, the Eola-Amity Hills AVA has shallow and well-drained soils created from ancient lava flows (called Jory), marine sediments, rocks and alluvial deposits. These soils force vine roots to dig deep, producing small grapes with great concentration.
Like in the McMinnville sub-AVA, cold Pacific air streams in via the Van Duzer Corridor and assists the maintenance of higher acidity in its grapes. This great concentration, combined with marked acidity, give the Eola-Amity Hills wines—namely Pinot noir—their distinct character. While the region covers 40,000 acres, no more than 1,400 acres are covered in vine.