Winemaker Notes
An exceptional Chardonnay from one of the Valley's pioneering wine families.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Medium yellow with a light gold tinge, the 2022 Chardonnay Casteel has lovely light reductive and briny notes, a jasmine floral profile, and hints of fresh golden apples and lemon oils. Full-bodied, how could you not love this? It’s a lovely, outstanding wine with a fantastic, long finish. A true pleasure-packed wine, it taps into just joyful, hedonistic pleasure. Outstanding. Drink 2024-2040.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Chardonnay Casteel has deep aromas of peach, honey, pie crust and hints of crème fraîche. The light-bodied palate offers delicate, gently honeyed notes—it seems to have closed significantly since bottling. Its shy fruit is structured by bright acidity, and it has an elegant, perfumed finish. Give it 2-3+ years in the bottle.
Rating: 93+ -
Vinous
Sweetly floral, the 2022 Chardonnay Casteel opens with a lovely blend of white flowers and raw almonds complementing crushed apples and pears. This opens with a lovely inner sweetness, seamlessly silky and refined, with crisp orchard fruits and hints of spice toward the close. The 2022 tapers off with an abundance of tension and a coating of saline minerals, leaving an herbal tinge as the senses salivate for more. Crunchy, packed full of complexity and wonderfully balanced, this is impossible to ignore.
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Wine Spectator
Brisk and steely, with focused apple, lemon verbena and spice flavors that build tension toward the vibrant finish.
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.