Wente Vineyards

I’ve noted in other reviews that winemaker Karl Wente has the freedom (and resources) with this artisan label to use all the tricks and techniques his family’s four previous generations of winemakers amassed over the past century. He is clearly putting them to good use thus far, particularly by avoiding the misshapen, outsized or place-less wines that endless funds and fancies could lead to. This Chardonnay – available only to Wente wine club members - is a good example: it’s full-malolactic, lees-stirred, and 14.5% alcohol, so you could use it as a cocktail. Yet it’s also got San Francisco Bay breeze in its aromas - the vineyards are downwind, in Livermore Valley - and a sleekness that many big Chards miss.

Aromatically you can’t miss the oak and honey that well out of the glass, but the apples and pears are there too. In your mouth, powerful flavors of apple sauce, pear galette, almond honey, vanilla and pie crust course across the palate with significant weight and body, framed up in new French, American and Hungarian oak. Yet the wine is fluid and keeps its shape very attractively across the palate. All the aromas return as soft echoes in the finish, which tells you that no detail was left untended.

Reviewed July 17, 2007 by Thom Elkjer.