Winemaker Notes
With highly expressive aromatics of orange blossom, jasmine, candied orange peel, and rose petal, the 2023 Belle Côte showcases its unique terroir and thirty-three-year-old vines with a rich, creamy entry, dense, broad, juicy mid-palate and a lengthy, refined finish. There is a seamless quality to this wine that matches power, gras, and intensity with structure and weightlessness.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This extraordinary estate-grown wine from a great vintage is super vibrant, energized and tangy, with vital acidity supporting luscious ripe pear and apple flavors on a silky texture. Can't think of anything it lacks. Seamless, layered, yet structured and fresh, boding well for longer-term aging. It has a melts-in-the-mouth quality and an extra long finish. Drinkable now and best from 2030.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Coming from the older vines of the estate, planted in 1990 with an east-facing exposition, the 2023 Chardonnay Belle Cote is a bright golden yellow color. It offers the most depth aromatically with notes of frangipane, smoky wet stones, white peach, salted pineapple, and vanilla. The palate is full-bodied and more opulent, yet it’s reigned-in and focused, with a long feel and a mouthwatering mineral persistence. The structure is built to last, with a pleasing note of bitter almond on the finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2023 Chardonnay Belle Côte has slowly unfolding aromas of apple, mushroom and brown sugar, which give way to purer notes of grilled grapefruit, white peach, floral perfume and spice. The full-bodied palate is luxuriously satiny and wonderfully spicy! Its highly concentrated, mouth-coating flavors are balanced by bright acidity, and it has a very long finish. Rating: 95+
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Wine Spectator
This is a stunner, showing smoked, salted butterscotch, with fresh and juicy notes of tangerine, buttery brioche, cardamom, nutmeg and plump, ripe apricot. Marmalade, orange blossoms and white tea are elegant grace notes, but the rich flavors, seamless frame and elegant acidity are what linger.
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 small and picturesque valley separating Napa Valley on its south border and Alexander Valley to its north, Knights Valley excels in similar varieties as the two aforementioned appellations, namely red Bordeaux varieties and blends, as well as Sauvignon blanc. Originally established by Beringer Vineyards, today several outstanding producers claim acreage here. The circadian cooling effects of the nearby Pacific Ocean create a nighttime respite for vineyards during the hot growing season.