Peay Vineyards Estate Chardonnay 2019
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Parker
Robert
Product Details
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Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
The even, fairly uneventful 2019 growing season resulted in delicious wines of transparency, nuance, and elegance. This is fully evident in the Estate Chardonnay. Inviting aromas of unripe pear and lemon blossoms set the stage and start your palate salivating in expectation of a graceful, not super-charged, wine. As the Chardonnay carries to the back of the mouth, flavors of green almonds and marzipan combine with yeast and chamomile notes that linger in a long, salivating after-taste. This is not a rich, fat or heavy Chardonnay, in the least. It is much more like the 2014 in fruit expression and the 2011 in body. It is lithe with notable persistence and depth. You can enjoy this Chardonnay now and also watch it age gracefully and gain even more nuance for a decade.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Estate Chardonnay has pretty aromas of apricot, spring butter, cashews, beeswax and bass tones of mushroom. The palate is medium-bodied, satiny and deeply flavored, with layer after layer of detailed fruits, and it has a very long, textural finish.
Other Vintages
2020- Vinous
- Vinous
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Parker
Robert
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Parker
Robert
Peay Vineyards is a first-generation family winery. Husband and wife, Nick Peay & Vanessa Wong, grow and make the wine and brother, Andy Peay, and his wife Ami, sell the wine and run the business.
All wines are made from grapes grown on our 53-acre estate vineyard located above a river gorge in the far northwestern corner of the Sonoma Coast, 4 miles from the Pacific Ocean at Sea Ranch. We sit in the chilly inversion layer with fog and wind from the Ocean maintaining cool temperatures with plenty of sunlight.
Winemaker Vanessa Wong left her position as winemaker at Peter Michael Winery in 2001 to launch Peay Vineyards. Formerly she worked at Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, Domaine Jean Gros and Hirsch Winery.
We farm organically and maintain our licenses for fish friendly farming and integrated pest management. The health of our vineyard dictates these approaches to farming and making wine. We also run on bio-diesel at the vineyard and solar power at both the vineyard and winery.
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.
A vast appellation covering Sonoma County’s Pacific coastline, the Sonoma Coast AVA runs all the way from the Mendocino County border, south to the San Pablo Bay. The region can actually be divided into two sections—the actual coastal vineyards, marked by marine soils, cool temperatures and saline ocean breezes—and the warmer, drier vineyards further inland, which are still heavily influenced by the Pacific but not quite with same intensity.
Contained within the appellation are the much smaller Fort Ross-Seaview and Petaluma Gap AVAs.
The Sonoma Coast is highly regarded for elegant Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and, increasingly, cool-climate Syrah. The wines have high acidity, moderate alcohol, firm tannin, and balanced ripeness.