Winemaker Notes
Sandy soils offer a lighter, leaner palate with focus on the energy and aromatics coming from this site. This vintage presented it impeccably with bright acidity, crystalline personality, taught, great depth, and wonderfully delineated flavors. White blossoms, lemon curd, hints of vanillin, and light honeyed notes, framed with a touch of reduction offering a vein of flint, crushed seashell, and saline running throughout.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2019 Chardonnay Zotovich Family Vineyard (15 months in 20% new barrels) offers up a toasty, apple, and brioche-scented bouquet that has lots of salinity and oyster shell-like nuances, medium body, a round, mouth-filling texture, and a great finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Chardonnay Zotovich Family Vineyard blossoms slowly to detailed aromas of yellow peach, pie crust, honeycomb and flint with savory undertones of roasted almonds and mushroom. The medium-bodied palate is satiny and expansive with concentrated, savory fruits, seamless freshness and a long, latent finish that hints at more to come with time in bottle.
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 superior source of California Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, Sta. Rita Hills is the coolest, westernmost sub-region of the larger Santa Ynez Valley appellation within Santa Barbara County. This relatively new AVA is unquestionably one to keep an eye on.
The climate of Sta. Rita Hills is a natural match for Chardonnay and Pinot noir, thanks to the crisp ocean breezes and well-drained, limestone-rich calcareous soil. Here, grapes ripen just enough, while retaining brisk acidity and harmonious balance.