Top 100 Wines: Chardonnay

By Jon Bonné, San Francisco Chronicle Wine Editor, December 5, 2014

Talking about Chardonnay these days has become complicated, mostly because of the lingering
aftereffects of what we’ll call its Baroque era. That era of excess butter and oak — with its many lovers
and many haters — still lingers in the mind, even though the state of the art with this grape has moved
on.
And yet great American Chardonnay is ever more manifest today — wines that are neither
overwrought nor anemic, that show a bounty of fruit (especially in the 2012 and 2013 vintages) and, at
their best, the mark of terroir. They come from special, typically marginal corners of the coast all the
way from Santa Barbara up through the Northwest.
The New Chardonnays are confident, complex wines that command their own place in the wine realm
— and leave in their dust those wines still following the tired old formulas.
Jon Bonne's Top Pick:
2012 Enfield Heron Lake Vineyard Wild Horse Valley Chardonnay ($36, 13.1%): The
quality of John Lockwood’s work with this grape was never in question. But I didn’t fully understand
how unique a wine this was until he coaxed me out for a visit to this vineyard, at the heart of a ranch
tucked into a notch 1,400 feet high between Napa and Solano counties.
While Heron Lake has a long history with growing grapes, back to the 1880s, it doesn’t quite belong in
either Napa Valley or Solano, which is why the area has its own appellation: Wild Horse Valley. The
influence of nearby San Pablo Bay is evident, but these are more complex, volcanic soils than what
you’ll typically find in Carneros. It is truly a unique spot.
These hillsides have been farmed since 1980, currently under organic practices, by Lockwood’s
mentor David Mahaffey(Olivia Brion) and Mahaffey’s business partner John Newmeyer.
Lockwood has taken the fruit and created a great specimen of the New Chardonnay: heathery with
cypress and green tea, ripe with pear and yellow raspberry. It shows a full blast of fruit, but no fat in
its texture and no makeup from the cellar.