Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
You’ll have to go far and wide to find a bigger, richer California Chardonnay. It’s enormous, offering an explosion of tropical fruit, citrus and apricot, brightened by crisp acidity. Despite the power, the wine maintains elegance and balance. This is one of the few Chards that will take bottle age, gradually losing fruit.
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Wine & Spirits
At first, this wine seems to be mostly abotu oak and lees - luscious and creamy. With air, it gains precision, the fruit building into a fresh white cherry flavor that's sharpened by a crisp, mineral edge. This comes from a steep hill-side block at Bien Nacido, planted specifically for Bob Lindquist in 1997. The block's northern exposure mitigates the sun's rays and contributes to the wine's implicit freshness. It deserves a few more years in bottle.
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 largest and perhaps most varied of California’s wine-growing regions, the Central Coast produces a good majority of the state's wine. This vast California wine district stretches from San Francisco all the way to Santa Barbara along the coast, and reaches inland nearly all the way to the Central Valley.
Encompassing an extremely diverse array of climates, soil types and wine styles, it contains many smaller sub-AVAs, including San Francisco Bay, Monterey, the Santa Cruz Mountains, Paso Robles, Edna Valley, Santa Ynez Valley and Santa Maria Valley.
While the Central Coast California wine region could probably support almost any major grape varietiy, it is famous for a few Central Coast reds and whites. Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel are among the major ones. The Central Coast is home to many of the state's small, artisanal wineries crafting unique, high-quality wines, as well as larger producers also making exceptional wines.