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Buttonwood

Winemaker Karen Steinwachs has raised the quality at this scenic property several notches in recent years by focusing her efforts on "preserving vitality and spiciness by not looking for maximum Brix levels, by gentle pressing, and by less reliance on new wood." I suspect that the majority of Santa Ynez Valley wine tourists who find their way onto the Buttonwood property, which is impossible to miss as it's just off the Route 246 artery, are really there for the atmosphere, which is understandable give the bucolic setting, but the wines merit far more attention than I suspect they receive. Steinwachs, like virtually all of her colleagues in the region, is more than comfortable with the recent cooler vintages "except for the fact that crops have tended to be crazy low," and she feels that sauvignon blanc, in particular, has benefited "because this variety still has a lot of potential to get the market's attention." She points to the recent explosion of high-quality and well-received racy, complex sauvignon blancs coming out of Happy Canyon as evidence that "people are responding very positively to the style that we can do over here, whether it's straight varietal wines or blends with semillon."

From Focus on California's Central Coast (Nov 2013) by Josh Raynolds

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2012 Grenache Blanc Santa Ynez Valley

Release Price: $22

Color: White

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