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Jasmine, white peach blossom, lemon meringue pie and white roses, with hints of vanilla cream, honey, orange zest and pastry. A vibrant, juicy entry leads to a well-delineated mid-palate and a long, mouthwatering finish full of drive and nerve.
Available in store
Close100% Chardonnay
Food pairings: Butter-poached lobster, Dungeness crab, seared scallops, roasted halibut, king salmon, roast chicken or chicken with morels, wild mushroom risotto, truffled pasta, and cheeses such as Comté, Beaufort and aged Gruyère.
Scores:
Winemaking: Under winemaker Robert Fiore, 'La Carrière' is fermented entirely with native yeasts and entirely in barrel, in French oak from select artisan coopers. The wine then rests on its lees for twelve months with weekly bâtonnage and is bottled unfiltered. 2023 began with a wet winter and a cool spring that pushed budbreak back by nearly a month. The temperate growing season brought no major heat spikes, so the berries held on to their acidity, and harvest came almost a month later than usual. The winery describes the result as full of energy, with great drive, freshness and nerve.
Vineyards and terroir: 'La Carrière' is French for "the quarry", a name that reflects the vineyard's bowl shape and tremendously rocky soils of volcanic-origin rhyolite. Planted in 1994 high on the slopes of Mount St. Helena in Knights Valley, Sonoma County, it sits between 1,200 and 1,700 feet on mountain slopes steeper than 40 percent. The shallow, stony soils drain freely and have little fertility, so yields are usually the lowest on the estate. That gives the wine its concentration and what the winery calls "liquid minerality". This is the expression of the steepest Chardonnay blocks on the Knights Valley ranch.
Family and history: Sir Peter Michael, an engineer by training and an entrepreneur who grew up in Croydon, South London, discovered the Knights Valley ranch in 1982. He pledged that the ranch and winery would remain in family hands for 100 years. He founded Peter Michael Winery in 1987 and was knighted in 1989. 'La Carrière' has been made since 1997. Today his son Paul and Paul's wife Emily carry the vision forward.
In the pictures: The estate's mountain vineyards in Knights Valley, and vines framed by California poppies (photos: Peter Michael Winery, via its distributor Skurnik Wines).
