100% Chardonnay

Food pairings: Crab, such as a marinated peekytoe crab salad, seared scallops, steelhead trout or salmon, roast chicken, and creamy dishes such as a mushroom risotto.

Winemaking: Peay makes its Chardonnays by traditional Burgundian methods: primary fermentation in barrel rather than tank, full malolactic fermentation for softness and texture, and stirring of the lees for silkiness and a touch of flintiness, before bottling the wine unfined and unfiltered. In 2020, the year of the great West Coast wildfires, winemaker Vanessa Wong used no new oak barrels at all, since some compounds in new oak resemble those of smoke; thanks to that care and the vineyard's breezy coastal position, the wines show no smoke. The warm vintage gave the Chardonnays a touch more weight than usual while keeping their site character, and the winery likens this one to a Chardonnay from Meursault.

Vineyards and terroir: For the first time, the 2020 Sonoma Coast Chardonnay was made entirely from Chardonnay grown on the Peay estate, rather than the usual blend of estate fruit and a little from the Searby Vineyard near Occidental. The certified organic estate sits on a fog-shrouded hilltop of uplifted seabed above the Wheatfield Fork of the Gualala River, in the far northwestern corner of the West Sonoma Coast, just four miles from the Pacific Ocean. Placed in the cold inversion layer and swept by ocean winds, it ripens slowly, so the grapes can hang into October with orchard-fruit flavors, bright acidity and moderate sugars. Chardonnay grows on some of the chilliest parts of the vineyard, in a mix of Old Wente and Dijon selections.

Family and history: Brothers Nick and Andy Peay spent 1995 driving the back roads of the West Coast with maps and a Polaroid in search of truly cool, coastal frontier land, and found it on a remote ridge near Sea Ranch, where no one had grown grapes so far northwest in Sonoma County. They bought the land in 1996 and planted the first vines in 1998. Winemaker Vanessa Wong, formerly winemaker at Peter Michael Winery, with stints at Château Lafite-Rothschild and Domaine Jean Gros, joined Peay before its first vintage and married Nick the following year. The San Francisco Chronicle once named Peay its Winery of the Year.

In the pictures: The Gualala River near California Route 1 on the far Sonoma Coast, close to the Pacific; upstream, its Wheatfield Fork runs below the Peay vineyard ridge (photo: Stephen Gold, 2007, public domain).