Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Chardonnay Fort Ross Vineyard sports an intensely tropical nose of pineapple and passion fruit over suggestions of honeyed peaches, ginger and baking bread. Medium-bodied and elegantly fruited in the mouth, there are a lot of understated layers to excite the palate and it finishes long and savory/yeasty. Only 239 cases were produced.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
The 2015 Fort Ross Chardonnay starts out with subtle notes of core fruit, lees, and chalk. On the palate, the wine is layered and flowing with core fruits and minerality. Its persistent and crisp finish pair it well with raw oysters. (Tasted: August 21, 2017, San Francisco, CA)
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Wine Spectator
Robust and richly flavored, built around honeyed apricot, fig and melon notes, with cedary oak accents. Ends with a woody aftertaste, but nothing time won't resolve. Drink now through 2020.
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.
On the far western edge of the larger Sonoma Coast appellation, the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA hugs right up against the Pacific coast. Vineyards, planted at rugged elevations between 920 to 1,800 feet, occupy only two percent of the total land in the AVA. Fort Ross-Seaview growers believe that the region boasts an ideal mix of sunshine, cool air and beneficial stress for producing high quality Chardonnay and Pinot noir.