Winemaker Notes
This Chardonnay has a clean golden color. The nose is deep and subtle. The palate is intense and concentrated while keeping delicate notes of citrus, and white flower. The finish has a distinctive elegance.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
This terroir-focused Willamette Valley label is a project of DRC’s Bertrand de Villaine and Katrina Rank, who identified the vineyard sources for Composition. Thomas Savre makes the wines. This Chardonnay, from perhaps America’s most significant appellation for the variety, the Eola-Amity Hills, exhibits intense fruitiness and classic regional minerality. Crushed stone and lemon verbena lead the way with savoury and mineral tones while a predominance of lemon cream shows a throughline. On the palate, there’s a richness to balance the taut, edgy minerality and white pepper. Taut and tangy citrus give way to notes of grilled pineapple and a long finish of soaring low tide salinity.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2023 Chardonnay is a bright straw color and opens to attractive notes of flinty crushed stones with lime zest, pear, white pepper, and powdery white flowers. Medium-bodied, it’s approachable and highly charming and has lots of finesse and elegance all the way through. It’s ready to enjoy now and will likely show its best over the next 6-8 years.
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Wine Spectator
Steely in style but expressive, with vibrant lemon and lime flavors that are laced with stony mineral as this speeds toward the vibrant finish. Drink now.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2023 Chardonnay has inviting aromas of white peach, panna cotta, chamomile, beeswax, honey and roasted almonds. The medium-bodied palate is more understated at this stage, with bright acidity, a hint of textural grip and a long, flinty 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.