Winemaker Notes
For the Estate Chardonnay Bethel Heights makes their picking decisions with tension and vibrancy over opulence and richness, as they believe this gives them the best expression of their sense of place. The 2019 vintage was cool, and the resulting wines are bursting with energy and vigor. This wine will benefit from cellaring for at least three years and/or decanting a few hours ahead of time.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Chardonnay Estate has detailed scents of fresh quince, white flowers, roasted almonds and flinty tones, offering up more nuance over time. Medium-bodied, it has a satiny texture and layer after layer of floral fruit on the extended finish, its fresh acidity calling you in for another sip.
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James Suckling
A blend of five parcels, this has attractively flinty lemons, pears and white peaches with hints of freshly baked biscuit and spicy oak. The palate has a very juicy, lemon-juice and lemon-pastry core with bright acidity and a smoothly layered 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.