Ponzi Willamette Valley Reserve Chardonnay 2015
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Chardonnay Reserve has a delicate nose of crème fraîche, lemon confit, white peach and wet stone. Medium to full-bodied and creamy textured, it fills the mouth with ripe citrus and white peach plus notes of honey toast and cream, with juicy acidity, finishing long and textured.
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Wine Enthusiast
This excellent reserve celebrating the winery's 45th anniversary is a multi-vineyard blend that includes grapes from the top cuvées. It's high toned and scented with whiskey barrel aromas and hints of fresh bread, caramel and almond paste. Although there's plenty going on, the fruit plays a supporting role to all the barrel flavors. Drink now and into the early 2020s.
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Wine Spectator
Graceful and polished, with expressive pear, spice and guava accents that glide elegantly on a lingering finish.
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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.
The Chehalem Mountains is a northwest-southeast span of several distinct mountains, ridges and peaks in the northern part of the Willamette Valley. Of all of Willamette Valley's smaller AVAs, it is closest to the city of Portland. Its highest summit, Bald Peak at an elevation of 1,633 feet, serves to generate cooler air for the rest of the AVA and its hillside vineyards. The region covers 70,000 acres but only 1,600 acres are planted to vines; soils of the Chehalem Mountains are a mix of basalt, ocean sediment and loess.