Opened last 2002 Domaine Serene Cote Sud and it is a nose full of hazelnuts…good bottles not great wines and all.
Opened 2014 Walter Scott Cuvee Anne. Diam 10 barely wet. Medium reduction and left the bottle open for several hours with hazelnut emerging. Premier Cru quality. Drinking fantastic with upside potential but not need to wait!
Happy to do this, I have some things that go back a ways. 2010 Crowley Four Winds and a few others.
I think you should definitely stay the course on trying things that aren’t part of the advice that comes along. I have come to a significant number of my favorite producers through recommendations from mentors and other consumers, but I also have had some remarkable experiences from taking a flyer on bottles.
Around 1998 I went i to a local shop and noticed a bottle of 1985 Swiss Chasselas sitting in a display case. It was with a bunch of wine paraphernalia and was mostly a dusty semi-relic. I mentioned it to the owners and started asking questions about Swiss wines, eventually they asked me if I wanted to buy the wine. I asked how much one one of the guys said $25, but if it was bad that he would give me credit for it on something else. It was in great shape and was unlike anything else that I had had at the time. It opened my eyes to how good Swiss wines are, even though they rarely show up in the US.
In Burgundy, many of the producers have had the same sites for many years. But in Oregon, especially for smaller producers, sometimes that’s not the case. John Grochau had Bunker Hill fruit for a bit but then the vineyard was taken over by Lingua Franca. It’s a really lovely site, and LF does an excellent job with it, but it took John a few years to get the Pearlstad(sp?) vineyard as a source and he’s making some really solid Chardonnay from that site now.
But for me, acid is the first key need in aging Chardonnay, and browning out the juice would be second. We don’t add any sulphites to Chardonnay until after malo-lactic is complete. It’s a modest add after that as pH for Goodfellow chardonnays is usually between 3.0-3.1. (That is not the case for 2015, where pH is just under 3.2)
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Opened a 2016 Goodfellow Willamette Valley Chardonnay tonight. Still some reduction on opening and while the acidity wasn’t searing, it was still present. Very nice melon and slate aromas and round and persistent on the palate. This wine will not have leftovers tomorrow. We are enjoying it immensely with grilled chicken and slightly spicy sautéed rice, and salad. Yum. Thanks, Marcus @Marcus_Goodfellow
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Hi @Will_Hamilton, would love to contribute to a chard throwdown and sent you a DM with various '13 and '14 bottles we could bring. Thanks for thinking of it!
This is another long response from me. Read (or not) at your convenience. Hard to provide a TLDR. Maybe it’s that I tend to think careful control of the must’s exposure to oxygen is integral to gracefully aging Chardonnay.
Regarding @Marcus_Goodfellow’s Chardonnay winemaking style, cf. Josh Bergstrom who says, “The regional climate of the Willamette Valley ensures ageability in our wines due to the high natural acidity and the fact that we achieve physiological ripeness [and] good flavors at the same time that natural acids are high and potential alcohol is low. But ageability with white wines, especially Chardonnay, [requires] making sure that oxidation does not happen prematurely, so our wines are made in a reductive winemaking style.”
Unsurprisingly, Shelby Perkins has an approach that seems closer to what Marcus describes, “To me, natural acidity is the essence of the structure in a white wine and should never be adjusted. I began pressing grapes in a protective manner, with oxygen excluded, but have moved toward the brown (black) style of must treatment for ageability.”
My understanding from this conversation is that hyperoxidation (browning) has a key though not necessarily primary role in the Goodfellow’s and Perkins’ treatment for phenolics. The primary role seems to be more about climate, optimizing picking for acidity, climat.
I wonder how much clonal drift has to do with what I consider to be the sign of good Willamette Chardonnay (for me this includes Cameron, Walter Scott, Goodfellow, Patricia Green). Not sure about this since Eyrie estate grows CA Draper clones and many others grow Dijon clones. On the other hand, this could also be consistent with my thought that clones self-diversify, meaning that the culture in viticulture really does matter. Something else to WV Chardonnay? Jury’s still out for me.
The old premox problem in WB seems to be cogent for this conversation on aging. The best possible explanations for it I know of are that some winemakers used silicon-coated corks and that there’s a delicate balance when it comes to exposure to/protection from oxygen that must be crafted for ageworthy white wine. The emphasis on white wine is because it is particularly sensitive to the more bitter aspects of seed and skin. Perhaps going out a little too far on seed/skin exposure and then trying to address the problem with sulfite was part of the premox problem. Even with the silicone hypothesis, Parr attributes the issue to silicone’s absorption of sulfites in the bottle. This is where I end my armchair musing and leave it to the experts, that is the winemakers themselves.
The quotes above are from Neal Hulkower’s worthwhile 2023 article on Oregon Chardonnay which includes quite a lot on aging. He compares quite a few wines, including a 2012 Drouhin Arthur which he cryptically found kaleidolfactic but also admitted to be drinking past its prime. Hulkower, by the way, has very nice things to say about Chardonnays from Evening Land, Chehalem, ROCO, and Goodfellow. This includes a Goodfellow 2010 Richards and a 2014 Willamette Valley Chardonnay. The article ends with others’ opinions on WV v WB Chardonnay which is less worth the read than Hulkower’s own notes. If the author is ever here on WB, 
.
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I’d enjoy participating, too! With advance notice to get to y’all from the East Coast. I’m sure there’s something I could bring to the table.
Thought I would address your post in smaller increments, though the overall post is quite readable.
One issue, IMO, in winemaking conversations about Chardonnay is the tendency to become binary in our view. i.e. is a winemaker redictive or oxidative in style. Being both at once is a perfectly reasonable and highly functional way to proceed, again IMO.
We brown the juice out looking for as much oxidation pre-ferment as we are able to. This allows easily oxidized compounds to bind up and drop out. Others can debate the merit but, IMO, in personal experience this absolutely works.
At the point primary fermentation begins we move into reductive process and in general I lean into that. We top barrels as soon as the violently actuve part of ferment subsides and maintain very little headspace from then on. The larger format barrels have thicker staves reducing oxygen transfer in barrel, and stay on lees with barrels topped up for 18-20 months. At the end of malo, we add a small dose of SO2 in order to prevent microbial spoilage and to keep the wines fresh. But I prefer to have primary ferments that last from 4-6 months, we do not warm ferments, and this both maintains the reductive phase over a longer period (keeping wines fresh) and gains a more complex fermentation signature. This shortens the oxidative portion of barrel aging, but between primary and malolactic ferments we have a second oxidative phase. Here I am not looking to have enough oxidation to impact flavor or aromatics but rather to allow reductive notes from primary to calm down. Post malolactic, barrel aging is mostly about allowing the yeast lees to break down and begin forming mannoproteins for mouthfeel.
While I understand that some winemakers look to us sulphites on more phenolic wines, I have zero focus on that. To my experience, I haven’t found sulfite yse to make any appreciable difference but I could be wrong there.
And I would debate the idea that a silicon coating on corks was absorbing sulfites. It seems more likely to me that pH shifts upward over the past 30 years, due to climate change and viticultural techniques, have a bigger impact on diminishing the effects of sulphite additions. pH has a huge impact on sulphite efficacy. Lack of exposure to oxygen pre-ferment would enhance the issues as well (IMO).
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This may be a bit off topic, but does anyone have thoughts on the aging time frame on Oregon sparkling wines? I have some “older” sparkling wines (for example, older Argyle Extended Tirage (2002) and some others from 2012). I think that they are fine to drink or hold, but I have not personally drank any with that age so I thought I’d throw it out there especially because I believe they are becoming more prevalent in Oregon.
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I think this involves dosage, en tirage time and maybe bottle pressure on top of usual alc %, acidity, RS and pH. Different dosage levels affect the aging curve as more sugar means a longer life than a brut nature. Some producers use solera so that’s another variable to consider. Personally I treat them like champagne aging wise.
I opened a 2014 X-Novo a month or so ago that I thought was overly reductive (and this is coming from someone who loves reductive chard), bordering on faulty. I am not sure if it was a one-off situation or not.
I had the same wine a few years back with the same result as you. I think it is what it is unfortunately.
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A very late response to your generous description of technique. Couldn’t agree more that “and” is the most important word in the reductive/oxidative “debate,” one which struck me as more productive for the wine wordsmithing industry than elsewhere.
The notes I’m taking are that early oxidizing “binds up” some (of the more bitter?) oxidized phenolic compounds and then the restriction of oxygen exposure commences.
For pre-ferment oxidation the explanation I work off of was that in grapes there are some compounds that oxidize easily, and in some varietals those compounds are more prevalent. By oxidizing the juice, these elements are tied up ahead of fermentation and drop out. Then the reductive element of ferment refreshes the wine, scavenging oxygen. The resulting wine is fresh and no longer contains the easily oxidized elements resultingnin a wine that ages more effectively.
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Ever considered consulting in Greece, where I’m presently visiting? They have grapes here (Liatiko is just one, a red varietal) that oxidize very quickly…
Lol…no. Greece seems like a lovely place to go to not work. And the French consultants are much cooser and better than I would be, but thank you.
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As someone who is presently procrastinating by posting here as I work in Crete, on Eastern Time, I couldn’t agree more!
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