95pts Jeb Dunnuck

I can't decide if I like the 2018 or the 2016 more, but both are brilliant wines. The 2018 Chardonnay The Coast has a slightly fresher, more vibrant style while still being packed with ripe peach, apricot, honeysuckle, and brioche aromas and flavors. Despite being brought up in new barrels, it's soaked up the élevage beautifully and is balanced and full-bodied, with terrific freshness and a big finish. It should drink well a decade or more.

These rich, powerhouse wines are made by Thomas Rivers Brown. They don’t come cheap, but they’re brilliant wines across the board.

Winemaker Notes

With an abundance of fruit in the vineyard and stellar growing season conditions across the board, 2018 is a formidable vintage. Given the robust crop load, we were able to do a lot of fine-tuning in the vineyard and adjust cluster counts to gain optimal ripeness and flavor complexity. Before you even approach the wine, its color draws you in with a luminescent yellow-gold hue. Aromatic notes suggest lychee, lime pith, honeysuckle, brass, and crushed rock. The mouthfeel of the wine glides across the palate with sleek, dynamic layers of jasmine, lemon oil, lilac, white pepper, and green mango. The entire trajectory maintains electric energy; a balancing act of richness and lean acidity that carries all the way through thedrawn-out floral finish.

2018 was a winemaker’s dream. Overall the season gave us warm days with no crazy heat spells or spikes that allowed for even development of sugars in the grapes and produced a decent size crop. With the full yields, we attained an optimal balance of crop load to vine vigor and we were able to hold the fruit on the vine longer for enhanced character and richness. When yields are too low, the vine does not have enough to do and the ripening pace becomes very fast and in some harvests, sugars can blow past target ripening in a single day. With the 2018 yields, the vintage provided an ideal opportunity for crop thinning and cluster selection and allowed the fruit to achieve true and complete ripeness.