100% Chardonnay

Food pairings: Oysters, grilled halibut, lemon or truffled roast chicken, and goat cheese.

Winemaking: The grapes are whole-cluster pressed and fermented with indigenous yeasts, and the wine goes through full malolactic fermentation. It rests on its lees with daily bâtonnage and ages for 10 months in French oak, half new and half neutral, before being bottled unfined and unfiltered. The winemaking team picks the barrels that best show the flavor profile of each vineyard. Winemaker: Courtney Robinett Wagoner, with consulting winemaker Erin Green.

Vineyards and terroir: Bella Vigna, "beautiful vines", is an appellation blend from the Martinelli family's estate vineyards in the Sonoma Coast appellation, made to reflect those coastal sites while staying true to the Martinelli style. The 2022 season began with early rains and ideal conditions; some frost-related shatter in certain blocks was handled by careful cluster thinning, and warm days and cool nights followed through the summer, until a record seven-day heat wave over Labor Day brought many vineyards to ripeness at once.

Family and history: The Martinelli family has farmed in the Russian River Valley since the 1880s, when Giuseppe Martinelli planted Jackass Hill, the steepest non-terraced vineyard in Sonoma County, still farmed by his grandson Lee Martinelli Sr. The family raised sheep on the coast for 120 years before planting grapes there, and the winery on River Road in Windsor is housed in an old hop barn. Today Lee Sr., Carolyn and their children run the estate, the sixth generation of Martinelli growers and farmers.

In the pictures: Vineyard rows at dusk beside the Martinelli winery, a converted hop barn with its three kiln towers, and the Wild Thyme Vineyard in the coastal hills of the Fort Ross-Seaview area of the Sonoma Coast (photos: Martinelli Winery).