Winemaker Notes
This Chardonnay is a great companion for chicken, pork or fish!
Professional Ratings
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
In the real world of $20 Chardonnays, there are many industry observers who feel that wines in this price range are often boring and manufactured. This is not the case with the distinctive and delightful 2015 Carol Shelton Wild Thing Chardonnay. The wine is ripe, yet lovely and wild with notes of core fruit and flowers. Just an accent of oak to round the wine's middle brings the wine into everyone's happy spot. This wine finishes nicely with plenty of freshness, making it quite food-friendly. Drinking very well now. (Tasted: July 5, 2016, San Francisco, CA)
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.
A large and diverse appellation within California’s North Coast AVA, Mendocino is home to several smaller sub-regions—most notably the Anderson Valley. This scenic region, with rolling hills covered in redwood forests as well as vineyards, is one of the world’s top producers of certified organically-grown grapes. Due to wide geographical and climatic variation, a vast array of wine styles can be found here.