Bald Mountain

Bald Mountain is a vineyard in the Ben Lomond AVA of the Santa Cruz Mountains, three miles inland from the Pacific Ocean as the crow flies. The soil is white zayante: decomposed marine sediment that looks and feels almost identical to beach sand. The vines are own-rooted, ungrafted; they were planted in 1989.

The 2019 harvest was the last harvest off this block. The vines had been struggling for years, dropping yield, fighting the wind off the Pacific, and the grower decided to retire the planting after the season closed. We bought everything we could.

The yield was tiny. Eight hundred and fifty-two bottles, seventy-one cases, total. One hundred percent Chardonnay. Pressed whole-cluster, fermented in neutral barrel with native yeast, twelve months unsulfured on the lees in barrel. Bottled October 2020. Fifteen months on the lees in bottle. Disgorged January 2022 at zero dosage. Then we sat on it for sixteen more months before releasing it in May 2023, because we wanted to taste it past its first nervousness.

Jeb Dunnuck reviewed the wine and gave it ninety-eight points.

This is the rarest bottle we make and probably the rarest we will ever make off this site, which no longer exists. Library release.