Winemaker Notes
Blend: 100% Chardonnay
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
The 50-year celebration bottling of the lauded achievement for this estate Chardonnay, landing in the top three awarded Chardonnays from this historic event from 1976. Its billowy mouthfeel offers a creamy base. Crème brûlée, banana, mango, and lemon cookie batter make a rich statement. A fine line of acidity reins in the weight, creating an elegant and pure tasting white wine.
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James Suckling
Comforting aromas of brown butter, toasted caraway seeds, creme brulee, lemons and clotted cream. The embracing palate shows guava paste, persimmons, vanilla flan, baking spices and minerals. For all its flesh, this stays fresh from its spine of acidity. Drink or hold.
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Wine Spectator
On first impression, this is a firm and spicy wine, but layers of baked apple, poached pear and fresh citrus zest, along with dried apricot and juicy mango, come together for a satisfying, complex expression. Notes of candied ginger, green cardamom, toasted coconut and lemon meringue linger.
The Chalone Estate Vineyard is one of the most remarkable winery properties in California, and the sole winery within the Chalone AVA. The vineyard was planted in 1919, with the production under the Chalone Vineyard brand beginning in 1960.
Chalone wines speak to the unique terroir of this wild, isolated and high-elevation mountain plateau in Monterey County, located adjacent to the Pinnacles National Monument. The wines reflect a unique character that is attributed to the area’s granitic and limestone soils as well as the large daily diurnal shifts, ultimately resulting in wines with distinct minerality and balance between ripe fruit character and bright acidity.
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.
The largest and perhaps most varied of California’s wine-growing regions, the Central Coast produces a good majority of the state's wine. This vast California wine district stretches from San Francisco all the way to Santa Barbara along the coast, and reaches inland nearly all the way to the Central Valley.
Encompassing an extremely diverse array of climates, soil types and wine styles, it contains many smaller sub-AVAs, including San Francisco Bay, Monterey, the Santa Cruz Mountains, Paso Robles, Edna Valley, Santa Ynez Valley and Santa Maria Valley.
While the Central Coast California wine region could probably support almost any major grape varietiy, it is famous for a few Central Coast reds and whites. Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel are among the major ones. The Central Coast is home to many of the state's small, artisanal wineries crafting unique, high-quality wines, as well as larger producers also making exceptional wines.