Winemaker Notes
Ideal for fish-based dishes, light first courses and fresh cheese.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A white with aromas of pears, lemon blossoms and honeysuckle. Medium-bodied with lemon tart and white flowers on the palate and lemon tart and apples at the end. Complex and thought-provoking. One-fourth aged in acacia wood. Low sulfur and made from organically grown grapes.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The certified organic Il Borro 2022 Chardonnay La Melle sees no contact with oak and is made without malolactic fermentation in order to maintain a crisp and fresh fruit profile. Winemaking in stainless steel includes four or five hours of skin contact after a spell in the cold room. This wine is shiny and bright with aromas of white spring flower, citrus and zesty salinity. It ages on the fine lees for 90 days with some stirring. I like that glossy, almost latex-like note on the close.
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.
One of the most iconic Italian regions for wine, scenery and history, Tuscany is the world’s most important outpost for the Sangiovese grape. Tuscan wine ranges in style from fruity and simple to complex and age-worthy, Sangiovese makes up a significant percentage of plantings here, with the white Trebbiano Toscano coming in second.
Within Tuscany, many esteemed wines have their own respective sub-zones, including Chianti, Brunello di Montalcino and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. The climate is Mediterranean and the topography consists mostly of picturesque rolling hills, scattered with vineyards.
Sangiovese at its simplest produces straightforward pizza-friendly Tuscan wines with bright and juicy red fruit, but at its best it shows remarkable complexity and ageability. Top-quality Sangiovese-based wines can be expressive of a range of characteristics such as sour cherry, balsamic, dried herbs, leather, fresh earth, dried flowers, anise and tobacco. Brunello, an exceptionally bold Tuscan wine, expresses well the particularities of vintage variations and is thus popular among collectors. Chianti is associated with tangy and food-friendly dry wines at various price points. A more recent phenomenon as of the 1970s is the “Super Tuscan”—a red wine made from international grape varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Syrah, with or without Sangiovese. These are common in Tuscany’s coastal regions like Bolgheri, Val di Cornia, Carmignano and the island of Elba.