100% Chardonnay

Food pairings: Grilled chicken, roasted pork loin, wild salmon and salmon chowder, corn dishes from corn on the cob to creamy polenta, roasted winter squash, and mild Thai or Indian curries with coconut milk.

Winemaking: After a nearly ideal 2024 growing season – a rainy winter and cool spring, then a warm summer and an early September heat wave – the grapes were harvested by hand and gently whole-cluster pressed. The juice settled for 48 hours, then fermented in temperature-controlled stainless-steel tanks using only indigenous yeasts, with full malolactic fermentation in tank. The wine was aged for nine months in medium-toast oak barrels and bottled unfiltered. It is vegan friendly and sealed with a screw cap.

Vineyards and terroir: SignPost comes from the west Sebastopol area of the Russian River Valley, on land that was formerly apple orchards. The vines are an old field (massal) selection of Chardonnay planted in 1978, cane pruned in fine, well-drained Goldridge sandy loam. Afternoon breezes and the marine layer keep the site cool: the gentle sunlight produces smaller grapes that ripen over more days at lower temperatures, giving fruit with more flavor and complexity, while the marine influence naturally limits the crop.

Family and history: Trig Point is the family company of Nick and Yolyn Goldschmidt, both originally from New Zealand, founded in 1998 to make site-specific wines from great vineyards. The name comes from the trigonometrical stations set on hilltops to establish boundary lines: Nick's father, a land surveyor, used these "trigs" as references, just as Nick does with well-known vineyard sites. After studies in horticulture, viticulture and winemaking in New Zealand and Australia, Nick became winemaker at Simi Winery in 1990, worked as a "flying winemaker" in New Zealand, Argentina and Italy, and later oversaw winemaking for many California brands before going out on his own full time in 2008.

In the pictures: Vineyard in autumn in the Russian River Valley, Sonoma County (photo: GoodWineUnder20, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons). Apple orchard near Sebastopol, the area where SignPost's vineyard was planted on former orchard land (photo: Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).