Winemaker Notes
The Canoe Ridge Estate Chardonnay is refined and elegant and offers apple and citrus aromas with a clean, refreshing finish. We age the wine in lighter French oak barrels to maintain the fresh, elegant style of this Chardonnay.
Ideal pairings include salmon, crab cakes, and pork.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Peach, apricot, pineapple, cream and praline on the nose. It’s medium-to full-bodied with creamy layers and bright acidity. Concentrated, yet fresh and pretty. Drink or hol
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Wine Enthusiast
Aromas of peach, straw and sweet spice lead to stone fruit flavors that are rich in the center. Like many wines from this vintage, its appeal is much about the balance it brings.
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Wine & Spirits
This chardonnay from a warm site has a rich scent of chopped pineapple, cut slightly by citrus. It’s satisfying, delivering a lot of weight and body for the price.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Chardonnay Canoe Ridge Estate Vineyard displays a pale gold core and offers aromas of candy corn, yellow apples, wax melon, marshmallow and sweet citrus. Medium to full-bodied, the palate is layered with flavors of citrus pastry cream and offers a rich mouthfeel with a soft nutty undercurrent from sur lie aging. The wine comes to a close with a delightful and round finish. 6,500 bottles were made.
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.
"Surely this is Horse Heaven!”
Its wide prairies and rolling expanses led an early pioneer to proclaim that the region looked like “horse heaven,” and as a result, the area was appropriately named. Horse Heaven Hills is in south central Washington state, geographically bound on its northern border by the Yakima River and in the south, by the larger Columbia River.
Its proximity to the Columbia River contributes to a variety of climactic factors that dramatically affect its grapes. In particular, an increase in wind from changes in pressure along the river, which flows from the cool and wet Pacific Ocean, inland to Washington’s hot and arid plains, creates 30% more wind than there would be otherwise. These winds moderate temperatures, protect against mold and rot, reduce the risk of early and late season frosts, diminish canopy size and toughen grape skins.
The vineyards bordering the river are on steep, south-facing, well-exposed slopes, with well-drained, sandy-loam soils. But the soils of the appellation are diverse throughout, ranging from wind-blown sand and loess, Missoula Flood sediment, and rocky basalt. Horse Heaven Hills has an arid continental climate with elevations ranging from 200 to 1,800 feet.
The first vines of the appellation were planted in 1972 in an optimal spot now referred to as the Champoux Vineyard. Today it remains the source of some of Washington’s most desirable and expensive Cabernet Sauvignons. In fact, the appellation as a whole boasts many of Washington’s top scoring wines. Its primary grape varieties are Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, Chardonnay and Riesling.