Winemaker Notes
Enjoy this refreshing Chardonnay with fresh scallops and avocado or caprese risotto.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
A white peach aroma meets hazelnut, lemon cream, brioche, whipped butter and salt on the lavish and yet restrained nose of this bottling. An iron grip immediately seizes the palate with chalky tension and flavors, then smooths into tones of lemon preserves on toast, tangerine zest, vanilla dust and sea salt caramel.
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Jeb Dunnuck
One of the gems in the lineup is the 2016 Chardonnay Rosemary's Vineyard, which comes from a cool, chalky, shale site in the Arroyo Grande Valley and spent 15 months in 20% new French oak. This medium-bodied, pure, vibrant beauty has everything. Complex notes of white flowers, white peach, honeyed apples, and a distinct salty minerality all give way to a perfectly balanced, layered Chardonnay that’s going to continue gaining complexity over the coming 2-3 years and will keep for 7-8 years after that.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2016 Chardonnay Rosemary's Vineyard features baked quince, apple pie, guava, orange blossoms and honeysuckle on the nose, with notions of honeycomb, gunflint, hazelnuts and dried hay. Medium to full-bodied, silky textured, wonderfully intense, savory and juicy, the palate is energetic and tensile, finishing long on a lifted saline note. Lovely!
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: Sometimes a winery hits it out of the park, and the 2016 Talley Vineyards Rosemary's Vineyard Chardonnay is a home run. TASTING NOTES: This is a complete wine with all of its parts well represented. Its aromas and flavors feature apple, citrus, and mineral, and it is all well-integrated. Pair its intricacies with fresh lime-accented sautéed scallops. (Tasted: August 13, 2018, San Francisco, CA)
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James Suckling
Cooked apples, pink grapefruit, lemon pith and spices. The palate comes across as quite smoky, but with some good, tangy acidity and a surprisingly vivid finish. Drink now.
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.
One of the coolest growing areas in California, the Arroyo Grande Valley runs from the southwest to the northeast, just a few miles from the Pacific Ocean and is part of the Central Coast AVA. Situated so that cold Pacific Ocean air and fog is allowed to filter into the valley, Arroyo Grande also has an incredibly long growing season. Bud break occurs in February in most years with flowering in May and harvest in late September; the area is classified as cool Mediterranean.
These weather factors combined with the soil types—continental and marine rocks, greywacke, limestone, shale and volcanic—create wines with great concentration and fresh acidity. The cooler end of the valley is perfect for Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and is a good producer of sparkling wines. The warmer, more inland part of the valley is home to some of California’s oldest Zinfandel vines.