2005 Chardonnay Mays Canyon

I tasted a wide range of wines with proprietor Ted Lemon at Littorai. For now, my sense is that 2013 favors Chardonnay over Pinot, which is a common refrain for the vintage. The 2013 Chardonnays are striking and precise. I found the 2013 Pinots a bit clenched, which Lemon attributes to a period of cold weather just before my tasting. That may be, but I always taste around the same time of year. My sense is that some of the Pinots may have been impacted by a brief spell of rain in late June. At this time of year, ideally, vegetative growth has stopped so the vine can direct all of its energy to the grapes. But the rain set off vegetative growth, which could explain the fact that some of the 2013s are a bit less deep than the 2012s. It will be interesting to see where things are once the wines are bottled. As for the 2012, they have pretty much turned out as I had expected. The Littorai wines remain some of the purest expressions of the Sonoma Coast and Anderson Valley readers will find. In 2013, Lemon used a little more whole clusters in the Pinots than in 2012, but the whole cluster inclusion here is never on the high side. In the cellar, the wines see minimal handling. I have also included notes on a few older wines I tasted. Readers might also enjoy this short video with Ted Lemon I shot just after our tasting.

Ted Lemon, who has destemmed his fruit in recent years, told me he has done very little stirring of the lees since 2000 as he found that wines made this way become "too flowery and biscuity." Lemon considers 2005 an outstanding vintage for chardonnay, thanks to the combination of fresh acids and serious chardonnay texture and weight. As to pinot noir, Lemon thinks of the 2005s as "brushy, earthy, herbal wines-not fruit bombs." Yields were on the low side, especially on the Sonoma Coast, where cool June weather, including a stormy period in the middle of the month, sharply reduced production and brought an added measure of concentration. For the time being, there is no more One Acre pinot noir, as the vineyard has recently been replanted.