Winemaker Notes
Crystallin pale straw with a shimmering silver edge. The aromas are perfumed with lemon curd, zest of citrus fruits, quince, and honeyed white peaches. Lively and vibrant on the palate, with a lovely creaminess, the citrus leads way to stone fruit flavors of white peaches and pears on a refreshing frame of balanced acidity. The stone fruit flavors linger gracefully while intertwined with interesting flinty notes on the finish. Elegant and fully enjoyable now, it will gain in complexity as it ages.
Professional Ratings
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Vinous
Brilliant straw-gold. A highly complex, mineral-driven bouquet evokes fresh citrus and orchard fruits, iodine, buttered toast and white flowers. Shows superb depth and fine delineation, offering vibrant orange, Anjou pear, sweet butter and anise flavors that tighten up slowly on the back half. Powerful yet graceful in style, displaying superb focus and minerally thrust on an impressively long finish that features lingering floral and orange pith flourishes. Drinking window: 2022 - 2029
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Jeb Dunnuck
The floral 2017 Chardonnay Elton Vineyard is starting to show its potential, with lemon custard, white flowers, and vanilla. The palate feels more complete, with rounded fruit up front, but still an energetic core of acidity. It is ripe with fresh green melon and saline minerality.
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Wine Enthusiast
Elton's quarter-century-old vines bring a complex mix of aromatics—yeast, flowers, herbs and even chicken stock. The wild yeast ferment adds texture and length to a high acid wine with Meyer lemon and ripe grapefruit. It's a multilayered, mineral-driven, long-lived style, with just a touch of 15% new French oak.
Cellar Selection
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James Suckling
Aromas of fresh pears and sliced green apples here with fresh-pastry notes, too. This is a bold chardonnay with ripe-melon and lemon flavors and a neatly resolved, vibrant fruit core. Long and balanced. Drink now.
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Wine Spectator
Precise and polished, with keenly structured lemon, crisp apple and savory spice flavors that glide along the finish. Drink now.
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.
Running north to south, adjacent to the Willamette River, the Eola-Amity Hills AVA has shallow and well-drained soils created from ancient lava flows (called Jory), marine sediments, rocks and alluvial deposits. These soils force vine roots to dig deep, producing small grapes with great concentration.
Like in the McMinnville sub-AVA, cold Pacific air streams in via the Van Duzer Corridor and assists the maintenance of higher acidity in its grapes. This great concentration, combined with marked acidity, give the Eola-Amity Hills wines—namely Pinot noir—their distinct character. While the region covers 40,000 acres, no more than 1,400 acres are covered in vine.