Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Wine Enthusiast
This wine is complex, well balanced and flavorful, offering a deft mixture of vanilla, butter and baking spices topping generous Bosc pear and white-peach flavors. Blended from three vineyards in western Sonoma County, it's great to drink through 2025.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Chardonnay Ryo-fu offers toast, golden apples, salted almonds, white flowers and stone aromas on the nose. The palate has a great balance of nutty, toasty fruits and bright, juicy freshness, finishing long and nuanced.
-
Jeb Dunnuck
Lots of honeyed melon and buttered orchard fruits emerge from the 2018 Chardonnay Ryo-Fu, which is a multi-vineyard blend that spent 10 months in 10% new oak. Rich and medium to full-bodied, it has a rounded, elegant texture and loads of character.
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.
Situated on the foggier and colder western edge of the Russian River Valley, almost abutting the Sonoma Coast appellation, Green Valley is one of California’s most reputable Chardonnay and Pinot noir producing regions. It is also a wonderful source of sparkling wines made from these varieties.
Goldridge soils abound throughout the Green Valley appellation. This fine, dark, sandy loam and fractured sandstone is derived from the remains of ancient inland seabeds dating back three to five million years. It is valuable for high quality grape growing because of its excellent drainage and low fertility.