Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Although 2013 may have been a difficult vintage, for some winemakers it resulted in immaculate wines with impeccable precision and focus. In this wine, the medium-bodied fruit runs from apple to pineapple. Twenty months in 10% new French oak has left an indelible impression of buttered nuts and a pleasantly oily mouthfeel.
Editors' Choice
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Wine Spectator
Bright and expressive, featuring a generous mouthful of pear, lime and guava on an open-weave frame, lingering easily on the lightly toasty finish. Drink now through 2020. 1,350 cases made.
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.
The Chehalem Mountains is a northwest-southeast span of several distinct mountains, ridges and peaks in the northern part of the Willamette Valley. Of all of Willamette Valley's smaller AVAs, it is closest to the city of Portland. Its highest summit, Bald Peak at an elevation of 1,633 feet, serves to generate cooler air for the rest of the AVA and its hillside vineyards. The region covers 70,000 acres but only 1,600 acres are planted to vines; soils of the Chehalem Mountains are a mix of basalt, ocean sediment and loess.