2015 Chardonnay

This is a strong set of wines from Vineyard 7&8. The 2014 is the first Cabernet Martha McClellan made at the estate. Half of the fermentations were done whole berry and in barrel, a painstaking labor of love. As good as the 2014 is, the 2015 may be even better. While Cabernet naturally gets most of the attention there, the Chardonnay off this Spring Mountain property is consistently noteworthy.

As I have written here in the past, Vineyard 7 & 8 is in the middle of a significant transition that is likely to take a few years given that changes in the production of wine are never especially fast. After all, there is only one harvest a year. Winemaker Martha McClellan arrived in 2014 and immediately instituted some of the stylistic choices that inform her wines. These include a good amount of fermentation in barrel, extended time on the skins and aging in barrel that is on the longer side of things by Napa Valley standards. McClellan arrived late in 2014, and 2015 was a freakish vintage, so I will not be surprised if the wines from those years end up being works in progress. The fruit I saw just before the 2016 harvest was as close to perfect as it gets, which means those wines will give a very good indication as to the true potential of this Spring Mountain site. Proprietor Wes Steffens has repositioned Vineyard 7 & 8 as a pure estate winery and spun out the wines he makes with non-estate fruit into a second label called Correlation.