Winemaker Notes
This premiere Chardonnay opens with aromas of lemon verbena, white peach, wet sidewalk and cracked almond. Flavors of nectarine, beeswax, orange blossom water, Meyer lemon and peach skin unfold into a long, lively finish.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2019 Chardonnay Rosemary's Vineyard is one of the more racy, vibrant wines in the lineup, and it’s going to need bottle age. Offering up lots of salinity in its citrus, spicy oak, and floral aromatics, it hits the palate with medium-bodied richness, high yet integrated acidity, good mid-palate depth, and outstanding length. Do your best to hide bottles for at least 2-3 years. Rating: 94+
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Wine Enthusiast
There’s a delicate interplay between the ripe aromas of peach, pineapple and honeysuckle and the chalky stone tones on the nose of this bottling. The palate, while grippy, is more obviously opulent, with white-peach, almond-butter and vanilla-caramel flavors
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Wine & Spirits
The fruit at Rosemary’s ripens later than grapes at the rest of the Talley estate, producing an opulent chardonnay. Showing golden apple flavors, amplified by rich oak tones spiced with cinnamon, the wine is con- toured by a mineral tang, saline and smoky.
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Connoisseurs' Guide
Even if still a bit backward owing to its youth and a little slow to completely unfold, this sleek and very lively youngster shows a very nice interplay of fresh apples, sweet lemons and creamy oak with accents of lightly toasted almonds and a background whisper of lees. It has room to grow and the structure to ensure more than a few years of successful cellaring, yet, even now, before it has fully bloomed, it is a deep, wellcrafted Chardonnay that not only hits the varietal mark smartly but goes a step or two beyond.
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.