The California Wine Region Winning Over Chardonnay Skeptics
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Twenty years after the release of Sideways, Santa Barbara County remains famous for its revered Pinot Noir, drawing attention away from the incredible Chardonnay from its Sta. Rita Hills AVA. With glaring sunshine, moderate temperatures, cool nights, and strong ocean breezes, Sta. Rita Hills offers the perfect environment for cold-weather grape growing, the kind that is ideal for Chardonnay. A subregion of the Central Coast’s Santa Ynez Valley AVA, it is located in Santa Barbara County between Buellton, made famous by Sideways, and Lompoc, which has a collection of wineries and tasting rooms that has been given the moniker Lompoc Wine Ghetto. The east to west direction of two valleys nestled between three ranges of hills allows for cold Pacific air to funnel across vineyards, maintaining the vivid acidity that is the hallmark of Sta. Rita Hills Chardonnay.
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Legendary regional pioneer Richard Sanford, founder of Sanford and Benedict Winery & Vineyards, coined the term “refrigerated sunlight” to describe the cool layer of marine fog that rolls in each morning only be dispersed by afternoon winds, revealing abundant late-day sunshine. Alma Rosa winemaker Samra Morris, who crafts Chardonnay (as well as Pinot Noir, Grenache, and Syrah) from the El Jabali vineyard, which was planted by Sanford in 1983, credits the “combination of powerful cooling influences from onshore winds and fog from the Pacific Ocean, which blow through the gaps of the local transverse mountain range” for the “bright acidity and subtle oceanic aromas” of the region’s Chardonnay. These effects also allow for extended hangtime, permitting grapes to come to full ripeness without sacrificing freshness. “The longer growing season allows the fruit to create concentrated flavor, building intensity and complexity in Chardonnay while maintaining bright acidity and firm structure,” Morris says.
In addition to its distinct climate, the AVA’s soils add to the complexity of its grapes. The combination of limestone and diatomaceous earth—the fossilized, sedimentary remains of tiny creatures that live in both fresh and salt water—is unique to the area and leads to lower yields and small grapes that offer a higher skin-to-juice ratio that result in a wine with “great concentration, depth, and the potential to improve with age,” according to Matt Dees, winemaker at the Hilt Estate. While the estate was purchased in 2014 with Pinot Noir in mind, Dees produced his first vintage of Hilt Estate Chardonnay two years later and has been grafting vines over to Chardonnay “at a slow but steady pace, a few acres per year.”
Most winemakers in Sta. Rita Hills are making their Chardonnay with the idea of avoiding what John Schwartz, CEO of Grands Joueurs Vignerons, calls “oaky, vanilla, buttery, homogenous-style Chardonnay.” Schwartz makes a Chard here called Mon Trajet, which is French for “my journey” and sounds an awful lot like a Burgundian appellation that he seeks to emulate. Attempting to avoid the over-oaked style that plagues Chardonnay worldwide, Schwartz and his team ferment and age in concrete eggs and neutral oak barrels to “accentuate the true varietal elements without over imposing wood components,” and then “flash” in new Burgundian oak for three months to add texture and mid-palate length. He has succeeded in creating a wine with bold acidity and rich mouthfeel alongside flavors of apple, melon, and lemon zest with a strong backbone of minerality.
Greg Brewer has had 29 years to perfect his Brewer-Clifton Sta. Rita Hills Chardonnay, which is sourced from four different vineyards within the appellation. Allowing the grapes to speak for themselves, Brewer utilizes a gravity-flow winery and works with neutral barrels that have already seen between 10 and 25 years of use. He eschews bâtonnage to not disturb the lees in search of a style that showcases what he refers to as lucidity and precision. “We strive to produce a Chardonnay with the most elementary and primal vocabulary as possible,” Brewer says. And, like his neighbors, he achieves his goal with each passing vintage. Flavors of lemon-lime, tangerine peel, and honeysuckle are accented by a palpable sense of minerality, a hint of saltiness, and a bright through-line of acidity.
“I love the fruit density of Chardonnay in Napa and the tension and clarity in New Zealand,” says Dees, who worked has worked in those two regions. “Sta. Rita Hills has the best of both of these worlds.” He points out that he and his team “spend a lot of time in Burgundy talking about farming, but we make our wines very differently as they are very different creatures.” Like all the winemakers we spoke with, he credits the small AVA’s unique features with giving them Chardonnay that can be crafted into a distinct style of wine that may be reminiscent of other regions but has its own unmistakable profile. He and other producers such as Sandhi, Foley Estates, Liquid Farm, Tyler, Mail Road, and the Joy Fantastic are truly letting the terroir speak, and we love what it has to say.
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