Winemaker Notes
Vibrant fruit drives this wine with the underlying minerality and lemon ginger known for this vineyard. This wine has weight, substance and complexity. It finishes long with a note of honey which is this wine’s signature. Don’t be shy about laying this down to age.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2014 Wildcat Mountain Vineyard Chardonnay gives notes of ripe apples and pears over hints of baking bread, crushed stones and allspice. The medium-bodied palate gives a good amount of elegant, understated savory and mineral flavors with a silken texture and refreshing finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine has a voluptuous rich-oak character, complemented by ripe apple and full-bodied concentration. It celebrates a warm, generous vintage in its ability to offer plenty of fruit and acidity, delightfully balanced by a lime chaser.
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.
A vast appellation covering Sonoma County’s Pacific coastline, the Sonoma Coast AVA runs all the way from the Mendocino County border, south to the San Pablo Bay. The region can actually be divided into two sections—the actual coastal vineyards, marked by marine soils, cool temperatures and saline ocean breezes—and the warmer, drier vineyards further inland, which are still heavily influenced by the Pacific but not quite with same intensity.
Contained within the appellation are the much smaller Fort Ross-Seaview and Petaluma Gap AVAs.
The Sonoma Coast is highly regarded for elegant Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and, increasingly, cool-climate Syrah. The wines have high acidity, moderate alcohol, firm tannin, and balanced ripeness.