Winemaker Notes
Rich, focused and compelling. The aromatics lift the wine. Creamy lemon curd, brioche and minerality consume the palate. Broad, long and delicious as the finish sails on and on and on.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is a foursquare white with sliced-apple, pear and cream aromas and flavors. Just a touch of vanilla. Full-bodied and lightly oily with a long, flavorful finish. Purity of fruit here. Juicy at the end. Drink or hold.
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Jeb Dunnuck
All barrel fermented Chardonnay from Frenchman Hills Vineyard brought up in 15% new oak, the 2018 Chardonnay Ch offers plenty of orchard fruits, honeyed flowers, and brioche notes as well as a medium-bodied, round, beautifully textured style on the palate. It’s another smoking value from this team.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2018 Substance Chardonnay is one of the world's top white wine values. TASTING NOTES: This wine drinks well. Enjoy its lovely and alluring aromas and flavors of ripe apple, tart stone fruit, dried peach, and a bare shading of oak with oven roast chicken and wild mushrooms. (Tasted: May 23, 2020, San Francisco, CA)
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 large and geographically diverse AVA capable of producing a wide variety of wine styles, the Columbia Valley AVA is home to 99% of Washington state’s total vineyard area. A small section of the AVA even extends into northern Oregon!
Because of its size, it is necessarily divided into several distinctive sub-AVAs, including Walla Walla Valley and Yakima Valley—which are both further split into smaller, noteworthy appellations. A region this size will of course have varied microclimates, but on the whole it experiences extreme winters and long, hot, dry summers. Frost is a common risk during winter and spring. The towering Cascade mountain range creates a rain shadow, keeping the valley relatively rain-free throughout the entire year, necessitating irrigation from the Columbia River. The lack of humidity combined with sandy soils allows for vines to be grown on their own rootstock, as phylloxera is not a serious concern.
Red wines make up the majority of production in the Columbia Valley. Cabernet Sauvignon is the dominant variety here, where it produces wines with a pleasant balance of dark fruit and herbs. Wines made from Merlot are typically supple, with sweet red fruit and sometimes a hint of chocolate or mint. Syrah tends to be savory and Old-World-leaning, with a wide range of possible fruit flavors and plenty of spice. The most planted white varieties are Chardonnay and Riesling. These range in style from citrus and green apple dominant in cooler sites, to riper, fleshier wines with stone fruit flavors coming from the warmer vineyards.