Winemaker Notes
100% Estate Grown and Estate Bottled from the TBH Vineyard - Small Vines' organically farmed vineyard surrounding their home and winery. This site sits on a cool, windy ridge-top with heavy coastal influences in Sebastopol.
2018 was a great vintage for color, flavors and tannin development. The wines show a superb marriage of earth tones and beautiful ripe fruit.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
A dazzling estate-grown appellation offering, this wine pulls from the TBH Vineyard, a cool windy site farmed organically by the proprietors, the vines densely planted and the wine barrel-fermented to a refined texture. Gravenstein apple, ocean air and stony minerality give it a complex, elegant edginess of structure and sophistication.
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Vinous
The 2018 Chardonnay (Sonoma Coast) is once again a stellar wine in this range. Apricot, tangerine, chamomile and light buttery notes all grace this super-expressive Chardonnay. The Sonoma Coast Chardonnay offers a terrific balance of fruit richness and energy. Drink it over the next handful of years. The Sonoma Coast Chardonnay is the second selection of the barrels that don't make it into the TBH Chardonnay.
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.