2020 PETER MICHAEL CHARDONNAY LA CARRIERE KNIGHTS VALLEY

Winery Notes

WINEMAKER'S TASTING NOTES The 2020 ‘La Carrière’ leaps from the glass with a bouquet of yellow spring flowers and baking spices, leading into notes of orange zest, lime blossoms, apricot, and lemon meringue pie, finishing with accents of vanilla custard. A focused entry is followed by a dense mid-palate with rich, oyster shell structure, a creamy mouthfeel, and seamless harmony. Lemon custard, crème brûlée, acacia honey, and white peach flavors accompany the generous grand cru body of this wine.

The steep and rugged terrain of the La Carrière vineyard produces fruit with a great concentration of flavor and aroma. Typically, this wine offers the most lean, citrus-like fruit profile of our four single vineyard Chardonnays, along with a vivid minerality that evokes nuances of sea salt and wet stones. La Carrière is named for the steep, rocky and shallow soils found at the high elevation and the vineyard’s distinctive bowl-shaped top section.

VINTAGE NOTES The year 2020 saw the first February with no rainfall in recorded history. The rains eventually arrived, with some particularly late storms—into May and even the very beginning of June. The late spring rainfall produced a good water profile in the soil at the beginning of the growing season. As a result, the fruit set was variable in our Chardonnay vineyards, bringing lower yields but high-quality fruit. For our Knights Valley Estate Chardonnay vineyards, 2020 was overall a cooler growing season punctuated with a series of heat spikes in August and September. The Chardonnay harvest spanned six weeks, with the first Ma Belle-Fille block harvested on August 19 and the last Belle Côte block coming in on September 30.