Red Car Estate Vineyard Chardonnay 2019
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Jeb
Dunnuck -
James
Suckling -
Wine &
Spirits
Product Details
Your Rating
Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
Notes of gravel, sea salt, and Meyer blossom.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
One of the standouts in the lineup, the 2019 Chardonnay Estate Vineyard displays the classic fresher, racy style of this estate yet brings beautiful depth of fruit as well as length on the palate. Notes of pear, orchard fruit, toasted bread, and just a hint of nuttiness all define the bouquet, and this medium-bodied beauty picks up a wonderful sense of minerality and saltiness on the finish. It’s terrific today yet could benefit from another year of bottle age. I wouldn’t put it past this to be drinking well in 7-8 years.
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James Suckling
Grapefruit, honeydew and fresh herbs on the nose. Medium-bodied with good energy and lift from the acidity. Subtle and nuanced, getting progressively more savory by the finish. Olives, brioche and dried flowers at the end.
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Wine & Spirits
Planted in 2005, the Red Car estate is 3.7 miles from the Pacific and 1,000 feet above it, not quite high enough to escape the fog. The fruit seems to carry that coastal cool into the glass, in brisk, refreshing flavors of nectarine. It may well make you salivate, and will readily join with a bowl of spaghetti with clams, parsley and lemon.
Red Car was founded in 2000 when Mark Estrin, Carroll Kemp and Richard Crowell produced 50 cases of wine from a single ton of Syrah grapes in a Culver City garage. In a nod to their Los Angeles roots, the new venture was named Red Car after the trolley line that ferried riders across the region for the first half of the twentieth century.
In 2004, they purchased 125 acres of land and began developing vineyards in the wild coastal ridges north of Sonoma County’s Bodega Bay, a region now known as the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA. Here, the interplay of warm sunshine, cool Pacific breezes and sandstone soils could yield the age-worthy wines of structure and complexity that had captured their imagination.
Today, under the direction of viticulturist, Greg Adams, and winemaker, Tanner Scheer, Red Car farms five dramatic vineyards including Heaven & Earth, Zephyr Farms, Mohrhardt Ridge, Hagan, and The Estate. This rugged terrain's coastal influence—where the Pacific fog filters in daily through giant redwoods until warm sunshine sends it back out to the sea—provides perfect growing conditions for their hallmark style: perfumed aromatics, bright fruit, crisp texture and uplifting acidity. Red Car is passionately committed to producing wines of purity and focus that express the authentic varietal character and terroir of each unique coastal vineyard site. At the core, Red Car is a small, independent farming operation committed to conservation and sustainability.
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.