"Chardonnay is an excellent conductor of “terroir” and notoriously amplifies winemaking decisions.

The key, for us, is to find balance in ripeness and fermenting temperatures to allow the wine to truly channel the vintage and site. We like to vary the ripeness levels to coax different profiles from each of our sites and hence pick our Lower Block of mixed clones at Royer over two separate passes about 10 days apart. We are very careful with the barrels we choose to let them help structure and season the wine, but not dominate the character of the site and use exclusively DAMY coopered barrels for our Royer Chardonnay. The wines are fermented with indigenous yeasts and kept on their lees for 10 months, and we resist stirring the lees. A small amount of sulfur is added the following spring after malolactic fermentation, and the wines are kept on their lees until a month before bottling. The final wine is neither fined nor filtered.

The Royer Vineyard is young, but is already showing amazing promise to make unique and terroir-forward wines of distinction. The aromatic profile bursts out of the glass with exotic spiced stone fruits. The palate features dense saline-coated stone fruits and a very long finish. This wine is excellent out of the gate and we look forward to tasting the evolution in the months and years to come.

Using larger format barrels for the site's fermentation lets us really tap into a more reductive winemaking style - producing those flinty mineral-driven notes on the nose and palate that are sought after in the great Chardonnays of the world! "- Winery