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Creamy golden apple and honeydew melon open onto a lush, generous palate, where yuzu lemon and wet stone add lift and minerality, bright acidity keeps everything lively, and light touches of vanilla spice from French oak carry the long citrus finish.
Available in store
Close100% Chardonnay
Food pairings: Roast poultry, pork, shellfish and vegetarian dishes.
Winemaking: Matinee wines were first made almost exclusively for Paul Lato's restaurant clients, some of the finest restaurants in the United States and abroad. Paul makes them with the same love, care and attention as his single-vineyard wines, but generally with less new French oak (roughly 20-30%), so they are ready to enjoy sooner and in less formal settings. His approach is minimal intervention and small lots handled gently, guided by intuition rather than recipes. Yields are kept low, and each vineyard is picked when the grapes are physiologically ripe.
Vineyards and terroir: Matinee is a Santa Barbara County blend that brings together two appellations. Fragrant, perfumed fruit from the Santa Maria Valley, from the Solomon Hills and Gold Coast vineyards, meets the structure, depth and power of Sta. Rita Hills sites such as Peake Ranch and Drum Canyon. Paul Lato calls 2021 "a well-behaved, polite child" and "a beautiful vintage" across California, one that shows the differences between terroirs especially clearly.
Family and history: Paul Lato grew up in Poland and first wanted to be a chef. He then trained and worked as a sommelier in Toronto and studied with the Wine and Spirit Education Trust and the German Wine Academy. As an intern, he worked harvests with Jim Clendenen at Au Bon Climat and Bob Lindquist at Qupé, and he counts Henri Jayer and the Chave family as distant role models. Starting with the 2002 vintage, he made just six barrels of wine on California's Central Coast, and he has grown slowly ever since. "We have a philosophy but not a recipe," he says, and his goal is wines with authenticity, harmony and elegance. After 21 years in a custom-crush facility in Santa Maria, the winery moved to its own space on Tepusquet Road, where a team of seven works like a European family business.
In the pictures: Vineyards in the Sta. Rita Hills (photo: Bradfordschultze, 2009, public domain) and vines below the hills near Santa Maria (photo: Tim Mossholder, 2016, CC0).
