TN: 2019 Sandar & Hem Chardonnay Bald Mountain Santa Cruz Mountains

Fans of Chablis and great Oregon Chardonnay like Goodfellow, Walter Scott, Vincent, Morgen Long and Cameron will enjoy this wine. This is the opposite end of the spectrum from Flabby oaky CA Chardonnay.

  • 2019 Sandar & Hem Chardonnay Bald Mountain Santa Cruz Mountains - USA, California, San Francisco Bay, Santa Cruz Mountains (6/7/2021)
    Lovely wine. Minerality, seashells, and green apple on the nose. Hints of melon and matchstick. The palate is the same. Driven by great acidity end to end. Excellent minerality with a med-rich mouthfeel and some hints of oak on the long finish. Serious wine, a nice contrast to the 18 Bruzzone and Mindego Ridge. This wine is a baby and has a long life ahead of it. Diam 10 Closure. This wine sits up there with Santa Cruz Mountains Royalty. Compared favorably to some much more expensive white burg tasted side by side.
    Sandar and Hemm are quickly establishing themselves as a new benchmark in SCM Chardonnay. To me, this is better than Ridge and Mount Eden young and certainly comparable to offerings from Rhys. Well done Rob! Will be interesting to see how these fair after 10 years in bottle.

Posted from CellarTracker

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Thanks for the thoughtful tasting notes Sean!

It has been a great pleasure to work with the Bald Mountain grapes and it is definitely one of the great Chardonnay sites of the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA. The site was planted 30 years ago with own-rooted Chardonnay material. This sloped mountain site is just three miles from the ocean and lies on a unique Zayante soil series which includes a bright white sand on which the vines struggle, yielding less than two tons per acre. Chardonnays from this site consistently exhibit white floral aromas and zingy citrus flavors but the real hallmark of the site is the incredible mineral mouthfeel. Our Bruzzone Chardonnay also is also has a saline and mineral mouthfeel but the Bald Mountain has a touch more richness and more overall power and length. Of our five 2019 single-vineyard Chardonnays I think Bald Mountain may have the greatest potential for aging. We hope to be working with this fruit again for the 2021 vintage.
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Love the Sandar & Hem Chardonnays, and the Bald Mountain and the Bruzzone are my favorites so far. A newer California Chardonnay producer to watch for sure, and their Pinots and other wines are also top-notch.

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I finally got to taste through the lineup a few weeks ago was very impressed. The La Beouf has its own unique character. Its got a very distinctive and recognizable orange component to it that makes it unique in the lineup.

Sean

The Le Boeuf vineyard is another site that has been a great pleasure to work with. The three acre site is on gently sloped decomposed granite and is surrounded by the towering redwoods of Wilder Ranch on three sides. It was originally planted by the owner Burney Le Boeuf in 1974 on St. George rootstock so the vines are approaching 50 years old. The site feels like a piece of old California with the century-old farmhouse and home on the site and the large surrounding meadow and redwoods. It has been a great place for hard work and reflection during the last challenging year.
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We took over farming from the owner Burney in 2019 and have moved it to all-organic viticulture and do the vineyard work ourselves with some help from good friends - many who are Berserkers. We also get guidance from an amazing Vineyard Manager, Ken Swegles, who has planted and manages many great sites in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We pick the site each year at a pick and picnic event for wine club members. In 2020 we budded over the south half of the vineyard to three heritage clone chardonnay blocks including two Old-Wente selections and a Mount Eden selection. We chose to bud over as the fungal diseases Eutypa and Esca had cut yields to below a half ton per acre (!!) and we hoped to maintain the deep root system to transmit the place into the fruit and to remain dry farmed. Despite the old vine age the incredible budding crew out of Napa managed to get a 95%+ take rate on budding.
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The vineyard just flowered this last week and if all goes well, the yields may be doubled or more in this first year of new plant material. We have also moved many of the cordons in the north block to cane pruning when a good opportunity presents itself. We only produced a single barrel for the 2019 vintage so it has been a wine club exclusive but if this vintage rolls out well it’s possible we get two or three barrels. Despite the small amounts available, we have a couple cases remaining so if any Berserker is interested in trying this wine please PM me.
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The wine from this site is singular like Sean mentioned - I’ve tasted a dozen back vintages going back decades and that haunting high-toned orange oil aroma is present in every vintage we tried. We knew it was there on harvest day as the occasional berry popped in your mouth had that incredible aroma and flavor. In a way, it reminds me of the Arnot Roberts Santa Cruz Mountains Trout Gulch Chardonnay which has a Mandarin orange character in pretty much every bottling I’ve tasted. It has a greater weight than the Trout Gulch but also has a persistent mineral mouthfeel and fresh acidity not unlike that wine. It will be fascinating to see if the new block of Chardonnay still exhibits a similar profile and that orange oil character.

We hope to keep improving the viticulture every year at this site. It has been a long-time dream for me to discover and bring back an old-vine site in the Santa Cruz Mountains, so despite the immense amount of work required, this vineyard has been a joy to work with.

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Not every day you see a vineyard worker wielding a chainsaw.

-Al

Even better: That’s a hipster somm. [cheers.gif]

The stylish pointed shoes are the giveaway! But Taylor, did an immense amount of work with us in the vineyard for the '20 vintage. His talents just happened to include chainsawing.

I just bought a rose, chard (Bald Mtn), Cab and meritage (the meritage from Hi Time) to try.

Maybe I can get Frank and/or Brig to join me tasting them and putting up some notes. Wish I could have included a pinot but there were none for sale on the winery site or at retail.

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champagne.gif

Mr Campbell to the white courtesy phone…

Let’s pick a night and I’ll grill at my house. Kids can hit the pool.

Weekday is fine. I’ll have the bosses coordinate.

Thank you for the order Chris! I have a bunch of orders going out this morning so yours will ship today.

I’m glad you were able to find the Bordeaux blend at Hi Time. It was a customer favorite. The Merlot and Cab Franc fruit came from a great little vineyard near our home in Los Altos Hills but on final blending we found 10% of our 2018 Bates Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon really filled it out nicely so we gave up the “Rene’s Vineyard” designation to make the more compelling wine. I whole cluster fermented the Cab Franc so it gives the wine a nice lift and contributes a nice mouthfeel to the wine.

Unfortunately we sold out of both '18 Pinot Noirs pretty quickly after the Galloni Review. The Berserker Day offer pretty much finished off what we had left. The 2019 edition of the Mindego Ridge Pinot will be released in fall so look out for it. For '20 there is no Pinot Noir due to the fires, but for 2021 we have locked up an incredible new vineyard site out near San Gregorio that we are splitting with Fogarty and we also have an expanded Mindego Ridge Pinot program on the books.

Enjoy the wines!

Wow, new site near San Gregorio! Must be really close to the coast out there.

I’m wondering if that’s the site I’m thinking. If so, you tasted a barrel sample of the '12 on our early 2013 Fogarty visit. As young vines, they were only getting 1/4 ton per acre. It was compelling, so I was happy to taste a vertical a couple years ago and very impressed. Vine age had added so much depth to the savory low ABV wines, and yield had dramatically increased to a massive one ton per acre. So, will be interested to find out if this is the same crazy grower or another one.

The site is called the Deerheart Vineyard. In the first few harvests the wine was made by Scott Sisemore (a really great winemaker) over at Waxwing. Scott is scaling back on programs so I got a call from the owner after he had sampled our Mindego program and after tasting through all the back vintages and visiting the site knew it would be an incredible addition to our programs. The wines show more power and savoriness than Mindego, likely driven by a blend of shale and clay loam of the Cayucos soil series. But that geology combined with the intense diurnal shifts yields a wine of both power and balance with vibrant acidity.

As we build on our story at Sandar & Hem, we look to bring back some unknown older vineyards that may have never been commercialized (Le Boeuf), explore established and historic sites (Mountain Winery a.k.a. Paul Masson, Peter Martin Ray, Bald Mountain, Spring Ridge Vineyard) and finally head out to these newer “frontier” regions where the grape varieties are really pushed to their limits such as Deerheart. In the next few vintages I hope to add a few more programs from this last category as I believe several emerging top Pinot and Chardonnay sites in the Santa Cruz Mountains will be on the edge of the AVA in the cooler sections, just off the coast, which may have been too cold even 20 years ago. There a few newer sites near Pescadero as well that are producing very promising wines and we have considering adding a Pinot Noir site from that spot as well.

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I decided to plunge for a 6 pack…could a non-member buy one Le Boeuf to try?

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Thanks for filling in this info, Rob. I helped Scott bottle a couple of vintages of his Deerheart Pinot but I don’t believe I knew where the vineyard was located - or else I just forgot, which may be more likely! So I should have a couple of bottles of those somewhere - I’ll have to dig through my wine and see if I can find them. Looking forward to trying your Pinots from this site. [cheers.gif]

Ah! So, not the site I was thinking it might be. I also didn’t know Deerheart was there and also helped bottle those Waxwings.

Anton, I just PMed you. I’m always happy to have passionate Berserkers trying out our wines so we can make it happen!

Thank you!

I am in and will post notes!

Very excited!!!

Anton, thanks again! Your case will go out GSO today and should arrive tomorrow. Just in time before things heat up next week. If you are ever interested in doing a zoom tasting with those wines I’d be happy to host and give you a virtual tour of the vineyards, winery, and winemaking. That offer stands for all Berserkers!

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