Under the Wire Chard 2017

Planted in the early 1970s by legendary Sonoma vineyard manager Chu Ordaz, this vineyard captured both the great site but also a viticultural world where widely spaced, dry farmed vines were the norm rather than the exception. Chuy is “mountain” Chardonnay as both its 1000’ elevation and intensity indicate. The Chardonnays from Mt Veeder can be so dense that sometimes its as if your senses can almost be overloaded. We handle this aspect but making a more aggressive than normal press cut, ensuring that only the nectar of free run juice with almost no additional squeezing goes into the finished wine. This means we get a tiny amount of juice from the grapes, but the result is that the site's more nuanced flavors come through. Immediately after disgorgement the wine was dominated by a steely gunflint minerality but after the wine spent some time aging, the lovely underlying peach blossom and white flowers began to reveal themselves.