Winemaker Notes
This wine is pale straw in color with aromas of toasted hazelnuts, meyer lemon, and sea breeze. On the palate, there’s a striking acidity and crispness, laced with textural richness and a power that leads to a juicy finish.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
This lively wine opens with aromas of lemon peel, white nectarine, and orange blossom. The palate is spry and citrus-driven, balanced with flavours of oyster brine, graham cracker and coconut flakes. A crisp and floral rendition of this classic site, and unfortunately the final release that will include the original, own-rooted plantings from 1973. 18 months in barrique, full malolactic fermentation.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Seeing the same 18 months in 20% new French oak, the 2018 Chardonnay Bien Nacido offers more salinity and minerality as well as notes of crushed citrus, sappy herbs, and crushed stone. It's medium-bodied and has a bright, racy texture, good concentration, and a great finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
Grapefruit zest, focused yuzu, chalk and apple-peel aromas make for a very tight and citrusy nose on this bottling. There’s immense tension and wound-up energy on the palate, where tart apple and grapefruit flavors are leveled by a chalky kick and lightest waft of smoke.
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Wine & Spirits
Chanin’s 2018 Bien Nacido is slow to reveal itself; my bottle was open for four days on my kitchen counter, and each day revealed more detail. The scents of lemon oil became brighter and more generous, the granular texture smoothed out, the tension became less of an impediment and more a driver of complex flavors. This is built to age.
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 lesser-known but elite AVA within the larger Santa Barbara district, the Santa Maria Valley AVA runs precisely west to east starting near the coast. The valley funnels cool, Pacific Ocean air to the vineyards more inland, allowing grapes a longer hang time to ripen evenly and achieve their full potential by harvest time. Combined with minimal rainfall, consistent warm sunshine, and well-drained soils, it is an ideal environment for grape growing.
Many of the wineries here are small and highly respected, having established a reputation in the 1970s and 80s for producing excellent Central Coast wines like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. More recently, Syrah has also proven quite successful in the region. Many vineyards are owned by growers who sell their grapes to other wineries, so it is common to see the same vineyard name on bottlings from different wineries. Bien Nacido Vineyard is perhaps the best-known and most prestigious.