Was gifted this wine by the MOST generous dude on WB…@dave_nerland! Thanks again Dave! Hope you hate the wine so I can buy the rest!
2022 Roy Piper Chardonnay Platt - USA, California, Sonoma County, Sonoma Coast (2/15/2025)
Splash decanted, open in bottle for an hour. Only experience with Platt Chard is the 19 Rivers Marie...a tremendous wine with wonderful ripe tropical texture and nervy citrus veins. The Piper looks more golden and substantial in the glass...first nose...WOW...is this Aubert?! Super expressive ripe peach, candied pineapple, exotic white honey butter, dried coconut, caramel corn. Rich and full bodied in the mouth...orchard fruits with a little canned peach...Maui gold pineapple...yet PLENTY of citrus squeeze that lightens and tarts it up nicely...has just a WONDERFUL soft and waxy texture of pureness...found a little alc heat in the RM...this one is perfectly balanced! Reminds me of the same impeccably balanced, pureness he does with his Cabs...the winemaker touch is evident. LOVE how nuanced the oak barrel spice is here...white flower, honeycomb florals...got me my fav...that dry extract, with a little salted crushed rock minerality...really creamy, and glides effortlessly down the old gullet. Blown away here! I've been reaching for more Ca. chards with a little more oak and spice and everything nice...sometimes you just have to get that Chablis grin slapped off your face now and then...this is totally the wine to do that! Amazing wine! (97 points)
Ha…had no idea Roy even made a chard! Zero hints from his vids. Hopefully @Roy_Piper will chime in and give us some intel on it! Good luck finding some though….
After AXA Insurance bought Platt Vineyard, a longtime buyer of that Chard fruit decided to focus on their own estate whites in 2022, and I received an offer to take over the last year of the contract. I jumped at the chance, but it was a one-off.
The fruit was picked at 22.6 Brix and a very low pH of 3.2, a far cry from what most North Coast Chards are picked at. I think we were the first pick in Platt in 2022. I used John Kongsgaard’s “death and resurrection” winemaking on it, meaning the juice went brown and no SO2 was added in it’s first year, I aged it for an unusually long 22 months in oak, only 1/3 new. No Francoise Freres oak was utilized. It was neither racked, fined or filtered.
I made just 3 barrels and have been selling it almost one person at a time to my longest, largest buyers, starting at the top and working my way down. I had to stop once shipping began, as that guts my schedule. I plan to keep a lot of it back for myself given it is the only one we have made.
Our Chard finished at 13.8% (I labeled it too-high at 14.1%) and it has lots of acid (just a 3.32 final pH.) I find it quite Burgundian in the mouthfeel, although it does seem to be entering a little more of a tropical aroma phase, which I think will not last. It’s much more acidic than Aubert but aromatically smells a little like his “Hyde” bottling. Platt is for my money the best Chard vineyard in America and I lament I could only make this one time before all the fruit was taken in-house.
The label is a painting by the wifey and it is fun to have this and the other one-off of Pinot I made in 2021 from Sanford & Benedict in 2021, side by side. I plan more one offs from now on. It’s a fun way to keep the juices flowing and expands my skill range.
Thanks for the info Roy! So it seems that Platt Vineyard, the winery, is keeping all the fruit to themselves? They state on their website that starting in 2023, they were able to vinify all of Platt’s production under their own name? But Rivers Marie made a Platt 23? Do you have any knowledge of what’s up there? Or @William_Segui
Patrick, While nobody from AXA has ever communicated with me directly, I believe that is true that from 2023 moving forward they are keeping the fruit for themselves and TRB. My last vintage of Platt PN was 2021, soon to be released. Fortunately, I have held back significant amounts of most of the last decade of vintages to feather out over the years.
Roy, you were very lucky to get into that Chard, even for one vintage. I worked with the vineyard for 20 years and was never offered Chardonnay until 2022 vintage, at a price that I could not justify. It was that year that I had to pass on the Pinot Noir as the price was suddenly elevated to a similar level that I could not justify with my customer base price sensitivity.
I’ve lost good sites in the past for various reasons over the decades. I don’t sweat it. If I don’t own it, I don’t have rights to use it indefinitely. There are still other great sites, despite what is written in the press releases whenever a high value-vineyard purchase is made by a well-funded company.
While I don’t think this is the case with Platt, I do mind it when another producer looks at my published vineyard sources and then approaches the grower for those exact blocks and/or rows. If/when I lose those, I get over it and move on.
Unlike Roy, I dislike doing one-offs on purpose. I make a large investment in getting a feel for a site, especially with red wine, where it reveals itself during fermentation and extraction. This revelation informs my harvest date decisions for future vintages, given similar growing conditions. Sites seem to differ quite a bit in their affinity to earlier or later harvesting. Plus, their potential affinity with other things I have in the cellar for the regional bottlings takes some time to understand.
