Winemaker Notes
Aromatically the wine is filled with stone fruits, citrus fruits, and an underlying scent of fresh cream. On the palate the wine is beautifully texture from the malolactic fermentation with notes of crunchy Asian pears, Meyer lemon zest, and bright, racy mineral driven acidity.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Fruit from eight different vineyards goes into this bottling. A bright medium yellow hue, the 2022 Chardonnay Eola-Amity Hills is elegant, with a juicy, decadent feel to its notes of sweet oak spice, delicate, floral perfume, wet stone, and fresh white peach. Refreshing and mouthwatering, it’s medium-bodied and crisp, with good ripeness of acidity and a clean, elegant finish. It’s going to age well over the coming 6-8 years.
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James Suckling
Plenty of golden apples, lemon zest, sweet spices and toasted brioche on the nose. Medium-bodied with crisp acidity. Well-driven and precise, with a vibrant core of fresh lemons lifting the mid-palate and a focused, juicy finish. Drink or hold.
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Vinous
The 2022 Chardonnay Eola-Amity Hills is a total pleasure on the nose, wafting up with notions of sweet spice, chamomile and ginger-tinged yellow apples. Round and supple, this possesses a core of juicy acidity that enlivens it's tart orchard fruits as a salty sensation forms toward the close. It tapers off with tension, cleansing and fresh, leaving a mineral twang and hints of sour citrus. Beautiful.
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.