Winemaker Notes
Sisters Chardonnay is a wine with lifted floral aromas and great length and complexity on the palate. Sisters also has the ability to evolve beautifully in the bottle and to reward patience with ethereal, flinty, wet stone and white truffle highlights.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
This reserve blend, named for Stone’s mother and aunt, is selected by Lafon, Savre and Stone as the best expression of char-donnay in the cellar. This year, those barrels came from vineyards in the Eola Hills and from a biodynamic vineyard in the Van Duzer Corri-dor, Savre ferments this using indigenous yeasts in a combination of neutral barriques and new puncheons. This wine is flinty at the outset, only to acquire a lees and oak-derived richness. The wine was lithe and sumptuous, with tart yellow apple and mild citrus flavors.
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Wine Enthusiast
This latest bottling is more broadly sourced than previous vintages, including some fruit from the Van Duzer Corridor. It's a sappy, salty and delightful wine, with a juicy mix of apple, pear, apricot and peach. A seam of butterscotch fills out in the finish, along with well-integrated, toasty barrel highlights.
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Wine Spectator
Brisk and steely, with pinpoint focus, this version offers lemon blossom, quince and crushed rock accents that linger on the vibrant 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.
One of Pinot Noir's most successful New World outposts, the Willamette Valley is the largest and most important AVA in Oregon. With a continental climate moderated by the influence of the Pacific Ocean, it is perfect for cool-climate viticulture and the production of elegant wines.
Mountain ranges bordering three sides of the valley, particularly the Chehalem Mountains, provide the option for higher-elevation vineyard sites.
The valley's three prominent soil types (volcanic, sedimentary and silty, loess) make it unique and create significant differences in wine styles among its vineyards and sub-AVAs. The iron-rich, basalt-based, Jory volcanic soils found commonly in the Dundee Hills are rich in clay and hold water well; the chalky, sedimentary soils of Ribbon Ridge, Yamhill-Carlton and McMinnville encourage complex root systems as vines struggle to search for water and minerals. In the most southern stretch of the Willamette, the Eola-Amity Hills sub-AVA soils are mixed, shallow and well-drained. The Hills' close proximity to the Van Duzer Corridor (which became its own appellation as of 2019) also creates grapes with great concentration and firm acidity, leading to wines that perfectly express both power and grace.
Though Pinot noir enjoys the limelight here, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay also thrive in the Willamette. Increasing curiosity has risen recently in the potential of others like Grüner Veltliner, Chenin Blanc and Gamay.