Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
James Suckling
An impressive wine that is very composed and complex and shows a level of fruit intensity that really only belongs to the best chardonnays from any part of the world. Grapefruit, white peach and chalky, flinty reductive edges. Well-struck winemaking on display. Powerful fruit on the palate sees dense peach and grapefruit citrus flavor drive long on a scintillating spine of pithy fruit texture and slow burning acidity. A stunning chardonnay. Drink now.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The fuder-fermented, all-Mendoza 2014 The Fuder Clayvin Vineyard Chardonnay is toasty, nutty and lush, with opulent layers of peach and pineapple fruit. It's medium to full-bodied, with a creamy texture on the mid-palate yet with a bright core of acidity that lingers in citrusy fashion on the finish.
-
Wine Enthusiast
Giesen's top Chardonnay is aged in 1,000 liter German oak fuders. Give this beauty some time in glass—along with a few good swirls—and a patchwork of enticing aromas come wafting out: grilled pineapple, nuts, smoke and salt. The palate is tight, linear and focused, with a salty, nutty finish.
Editor's Choice
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.
An icon and leading region of New Zealand's distinctive style of Sauvignon blanc, Marlborough has a unique terroir, making it ideal for high quality grape production (of many varieties). Despite some common generalizations, which could be fairly justified given that Marlborough is responsible for 90% of New Zealand's Sauvignon blanc production, the wines from this region are actually anything but homogenous. At the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, the vineyards of Marlborough benefit from well-draining, stony soils, a dry, sunny climate and wide temperature fluctuations between day and night, a phenomenon that supports a perfect balance between berry ripeness and acidity.
The region’s king variety, Sauvignon blanc, is beloved for its pungent, aromatic character with notes of exotic tropical fruit, freshly cut grass and green bell pepper along with a refreshing streak of stony minerality. These wines are made in a wide range of styles, and winemakers take advantage of various clones, vineyard sites, fermentation styles, lees-stirring and aging regimens to differentiate their bottlings, one from one another.
Also produced successfully here are fruit-forward Pinot noirs (especially where soils are clay-rich), elegant Riesling, Pinot gris and Gewürztraminer.