Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
There’s a core of fresh pears and peaches here with lightly nutty complexity. The palate has attractive fruit flesh and plenty of toasty complexity, which crisscross their way through the finish. Drink or hold.
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Wine Spectator
Offers a plush mouthfeel, with creamy richness to the ripe pear, apple tart and dried apricot flavors. Unctuous midpalate, revealing dried ginger and honeyed notes on the long finish. Drink now through 2025.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2017 Chardonnay Sonoma Coast is a ripe, sexy Sonoma Coast effort that has ample bright lemon, pineapple, and white flower notes as well as a medium-bodied, juicy, layered, silky style on the palate. Refreshingly elegant, with nicely integrated acidity, it's a beautiful Sonoma Coast Chardonnay to drink over the coming 3-4 years. Aged 10 months in 35% French oak, there’s 5,000 cases of this outstanding effort.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2017 Migration Chardonnay makes its way to the fore as a delicious main entrée wine. TASTING NOTES: This wine is fresh, frisky, and multi-faceted. Enjoy its charming aromas and flavors of dried peach skin, earth, and savory spices with grilled chicken thighs over slightly smoked peach halves. (Tasted: November 25, 2019, San Francisco, CA)
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine is made from several sites, including the producer’s own Running Creek Estate, as well as other sites farmed by the Dutton family. Green apple and pear carry along a sleek, supple and structured midpalate that’s moderate in oak, with a lasting twist of citrus.
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.