Winemaker Notes
The 2008 Sonoma Coast Chardonnay is pale yellow-green in color. It has a profuse nose of honeysuckle, vanilla, orange zestand lemon curd. The creamy mouthfeel is balanced with crisp minerality and firm acidity. The finish never ends.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2008 Chardonnay reveals a greenish hue to its medium straw color as well as a super-intense nose of mandarin oranges, quince, white peaches, and hints of brioche and earth. Full-bodied with good underlying minerality, this crisp, elegant, fresh white wine is another superb effort from a winery that has a Midas touch with Chardonnay.
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Wine Enthusiast
Somewhat hazy in appearance and high in pulpy, sweet and ripe fruit aromas, this wine follows the unabashedly, unreservedly outgoing style of unfiltered genre. Its fruit-first, pear and apple aromas are supported by generous oak enrichment in the nose, and the wine's bold, deep character is repeated in flavors that go on and on at the finish. It is no shrinking violet to be sure, and there are bound to be those who find too much of a good thing in its exuberant personality, but if balanced power fits your taste, then look no further.
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.