Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2012 Chardonnay Wayfarer Vineyard opens with crushed stones, yeast extract, waxed lemons and peach preserves notes, morphing into suggestions of yuzu, acacia honey and praline. The medium-bodied palate reveals great elegance, with slowly evolving citrus flavors and a silken texture, finishing with chalky notes lifted by a racy line.
Rating: 93+ -
Wine Spectator
Fragrant, with delicate white flower, peach and honeydew melon notes that gain richness without weight on the finish, where the fruit takes on a perfumed aroma.
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.
On the far western edge of the larger Sonoma Coast appellation, the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA hugs right up against the Pacific coast. Vineyards, planted at rugged elevations between 920 to 1,800 feet, occupy only two percent of the total land in the AVA. Fort Ross-Seaview growers believe that the region boasts an ideal mix of sunshine, cool air and beneficial stress for producing high quality Chardonnay and Pinot noir.