Winemaker Notes
There’s an elegant sense of fleshiness with this Chardonnay. The core of it is crunchy with mineral-inflected pear and citrus, but there’s also ample and succulent stone fruit. White peach and nectarine notes ebb and flow over the crunchy core, segueing into an airy reverberance of vineyard character, leaving lively notes of lemon curd along with subtle salty and apiary complexities. While there is plenty acidity and just as much as much as the last vintage, somehow the feel is less urgent and structured. This wine gives a playful kind of deliciousness, yet it’s still classic and balanced in every way.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Lots of orchard fruits, buttered lemon, toasty oak, and honeysuckle emerge from the 2019 Chardonnay Bien Nacido, a clean, vibrant Chardonnay from one of California’s great vineyards. Brought up in just 6-7% new French oak, it opens up with time in the glass and shows more and more fruit as well as some classic chalky, salty minerality on the finish. It’s a beautiful Chardonnay.
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 lesser-known but elite AVA within the larger Santa Barbara district, the Santa Maria Valley AVA runs precisely west to east starting near the coast. The valley funnels cool, Pacific Ocean air to the vineyards more inland, allowing grapes a longer hang time to ripen evenly and achieve their full potential by harvest time. Combined with minimal rainfall, consistent warm sunshine, and well-drained soils, it is an ideal environment for grape growing.
Many of the wineries here are small and highly respected, having established a reputation in the 1970s and 80s for producing excellent Central Coast wines like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. More recently, Syrah has also proven quite successful in the region. Many vineyards are owned by growers who sell their grapes to other wineries, so it is common to see the same vineyard name on bottlings from different wineries. Bien Nacido Vineyard is perhaps the best-known and most prestigious.