2022 Chardonnay, Rainmaker Vineyard

Chardonnay is a varietal that is produced in a wide range of styles, from lean and crisp as with a tank fermented Chardonnay, to a big wine rich with oak and buttery characters. We produce our Chardonnay in a style that is in the middle of that range resulting in a wine that has beautiful aromatics, fruit, and complexity, with sufficient acidity to balance any richness. We make two vineyard designated Chardonnays and relative to each other, Rainmaker will lean toward that more crisp clean style, although both are barrel fermented. We use one-hundred-percent French oak barrels, though just 20% are new and we also utilize only a partial malolactic fermentation. These two techniques, combined with our cool climate fruit sources, are much of what determines this style.

This is our first vintage working with fruit from Rainmaker Vineyard. We originally planned to use it as a blending component in our Washington Chardonnay, but these five barrels clearly deserved to be bottled on their own. In fact, we tried blending them with our White Salmon Vineyard wines, and not only did this wine get lost, but it didn’t make the White Salmon better, either. That is the magic of blending. Two beautiful wines do not always make an even better wine when combined with each other.

Rainmaker Vineyard is located in the Columbia Gorge, the same as White Salmon Vineyard, but its elevation changes everything. Planted above White Salmon at 960 to 1200 feet in elevation, this is the very definition of “cool climate” fruit. These unique growing conditions offer a super fresh, clean, pretty wine with juicy acidity. Characters of fresh crisp apple, lemon meringue, and star fruit are accented by a floral note of Thai lime, with a hint of mineral and graham cracker to round out the flavors. John Abbott, Winemaker