100% Chardonnay

Food pairings: Pork, poultry and vegetarian dishes.

Winemaking: Like every Walter Hansel wine, Cahill Lane is estate grown, hand harvested and sorted twice, once in the vineyard and once at the winery. The Chardonnay is pressed as whole clusters straight into French oak barrels from François Frères and Seguin Moreau, roughly a quarter of them new and the rest one to three years old, where it ferments with native yeast. Malolactic fermentation follows, the barrels are stirred weekly for about two months to build richness from the lees, and the wine rests in barrel for some ten months before bottling, with minimal fining and filtration.

Vineyards and terroir: The Hansel family vineyards lie at the southern tip of the Russian River Valley, near the Sebastopol Hills in Sonoma County, planted with eleven clones among more than twenty old oak trees that the family chose to keep. Stephen Hansel's father built Cahill Lane through his original property, and the family's homes still sit along it. The block is planted entirely to the Wente clone, whose clusters mix large and tiny berries ("chicken and eggs"); it is usually the last block picked, and the long hang time gives the wine its richness.

Family and history: Walter Hansel loved to grow things, and in 1975 he planted a few hundred Chardonnay vines as a weekend farmer's hobby; through the 1980s the whole family harvested them and made two barrels of wine. In the early 1990s his son Stephen took over the vines and, mentored by Russian River grower Tom Rochioli, became passionate about winegrowing. The label honoring his father was created in 1996, the first wines sold out immediately in 1998, and the estate has grown into a source of Burgundian-style, single-vineyard Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, made by the same team that farms the vines.

In the pictures: Vineyards in the Russian River Valley in autumn, with fog over the wooded hills (photo: Naotake Murayama, 2008, CC BY 2.0).