Chardonnay

Score

96

"A wonderfully crafted chardonnay with lemon rind, cooked apple, lemon and lemon curd. Mineral and stone character throughout. It’s full-bodied, yet vertical and deep on the palate. Takes you down deep and energizes you. Extremely well done. Drink or hold."

Score

92

"The 2018 Chardonnay Estate, from vines planted in 1994, opens with toasted nuts, gunflint, candle smoke and fresh Red Delicious apples with wafts of dried herbs and green tea. The palate is light to medium-bodied with a silky texture and gently nutty character, finishing long, fresh and mineral driven. Lovely! 600 cases were made."

Score

96

"This is among the best Hirsch chardonnays we’ve tasted, a wine with an ornate, almost baroque complexity woven out of fruit grown on the sandstone ridge along the San Andreas fault. It offers a completely different kind of complexity and depth of flavor than a great Burgundy—California coastal casual, yet precise. If you were to travel to David Hirsch’s remote vineyard and feel the blast of the Pacific winds against the ridge as you stand alongside the vines he planted in 1994 on a steep, rocky slope facing directly toward the sea, you might begin to sense the pure, terroir-driven nature of this wine. Along with fruit from those 2.5 acres, this wine includes Hirsch’s younger block of chardonnay, also west-facing, 1.4 acres planted in 2002 on a nearby sandstone hillside. The cool 2018 season produced a chardonnay that defies oxidation, still beautiful a week after it was first opened, destined to thrive for decades."