Winemaker Notes
Few new world Chardonnay sites rival the prestige of the famed Ritchie Vineyard. These true old Wente clone vines are among the oldest Chardonnay growing in all of Sonoma County. The 2015 vintage harnesses the potential of the vineyard by creating a Chardonnay with perfume, texture, minerality, and nuances of lemon rind, apricot, stone fruit. This wine can certainly beenjoyed at a young bottle age but the rewards for cellaring the 2015 RitchieVineyard Chardonnay will be significant.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Chardonnay Ritchie Vineyard has a gregarious nose of ripe pineapple, passion fruit and grapefruit with suggestions of baker's yeast and nutmeg. Medium-bodied and elegantly fruited in the mouth, it has a wonderful intensity of tropical and citrus flavors with a lively line of acid and a long, mineral-laced finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
Tangy oranges and tangerines accent sculpted acidity in this textured, gritty white from the always impressive vineyard site. With just a touch of reduction, it has understated elegance and a light-bodied style.
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.