2003 Chardonnay Mays Canyon

Sonoma and Napa were like two different worlds in 2003, noted Ted Lemon, most of whose wines come from the Sonoma and AndersonValleys.Following a heat spike around September 12, Lemon picked 75% of his crop between September 16 and 26, his fastest pace ever."On the SonomaCoast we were at it hard by the 16th," he told me."The pickers were auctioning themselves off for 30 bucks an hour.But on the Napa side, everyone was still asleep.Actually, the temperatures were high everywhere, but we felt it more on the Sonoma side with the thin-skinned varieties."For the past two vintages, Lemon has done a delestage in the middle of the fermentation (an "out-and-back racking," in which he literally drains the tank) to help the fermentations finish."Previously we often had to reinoculate our wines in May in order to get the sugars to finish fermenting, and we lost in freshness more than we gained in added glycerol. But now our wines are routinely under one gram of sugar per liter."All of the wines but one were bottled in February, a few weeks before I tasted them.