Best Buys from Year’s Best California Chardonnays

As summer turns to fall, a rich white wine can be as comforting as any hearty red. Out of 379 California chardonnays our blind panels tasted over the past 12 months, here’s an array of great Best Buys from the Year’s Best California Chardonnays category in our October 2020 issue.

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With its scents of orange blossoms and gardenias, this smells like a flower garden in June. Layered with creamy vanilla notes and some relieving bitterness of oak tannins, it feels spicy and cool. —Joshua Greene 

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More fragrant honey than straight-on vanilla, this wine’s oak is cushioned by a basketful of summer peach and fresh green pear flavors. It feels cool and brisk, a mellow chardonnay to chill for salmon rillettes. —J.G. 

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Clean and brisk, this takes creamy Napa Valley ripeness and adds a smoky, raw-almond depth of flavor. —J.G. 

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Like a cool, gentle rain, this is more a textural pleasure than an overtly fruity chardonnay. The fruit that’s there is crunchy, like wild carrots and pale ginger, the texture creamy and broad, with grape-skin tannins enriching the middle. It’s salty and fat in a way that would cozy up to scallop sashimi and pickled ginger. —J.G.

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A blend from two far-coast vineyards in Annapolis, this is a brisk, cool riff on sandstone. It has the floral spice of jasmine, some green-pear tannins and a mineral savor. —J.G.  

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A smooth, supple chardonnay with crunchy grape flavors and a muscular scallop-like fatness to the fruit, this is salty, rich and a steal at $18. —J.G.  

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Rich and tropical, this chardonnay becomes complex with exposure to air, with notes of golden apple, raisin and nutty sunflower seeds. It’s broad, powerful and focused. —Patrick J. Comiskey

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This wine has the youthful insistence of a newly released Chablis, with tart cider-apple acidity and grassy notes. It’s creamy and blunt in its undeveloped intensity, formidable in its tension. Give this a year in bottle; it should develop with elegance. —J.G. 

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A pale wine with cool flavors of kiwi and honeydew melon, this is simple, creamy and soft in the middle, with a lovely earthy acidity that carries the wine to a clean and savory finish. —J.G.  

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An elegant wine, with the rich feel of glycerol and honey, this is not particularly aromatic up front, but builds to a crescendo of complexity by the end, in layers of orchard fruit and toasted lees. —J.G.

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With its mineral freshness and apple-skin spice, this is a clean and powerful chardonnay, that power driven by some reduction that keeps the wine tight. Give it time in a decanter to open up, then serve as an aperitif with poached prawns. —J.G.

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Buzzing with grapey freshness, this simple, unfettered chardonnay follows a narrow path. It impresses with clarity rather than weight, a bright, light and mouthwatering wine that’s all about simple pleasures. Pour it on its own, or with pan-roasted lemon sole. —J.G. 

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All salt and smoke at first, with flashy new oak, this tames with air, turning elegant and exotic, toward mesquite smoke and golden caramel, salted apple and citrus, with a finish as buttery and generous as piecrust. —P.J.C.

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Tightly wound, this wine is all lemon peel and lees, electric and lean. You can feel the tension in its mouthwatering energy, in its graceful lines and precise, mineral finish. It’s a whisper-clean performance for bracingly fresh fish. —P.J.C.

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Intriguing and layered, this wine has an earthy tannic briskness. The flavors range from lime to yellow apple and green plum, firm enough to absorb the oak in which it aged, and to last, with the cool pallor of a morning-sun wine. —J.G.  

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A classic California chardonnay in the best sense: Oak contributes a hint of butterscotch sweetness to an otherwise fresh, savory wine, layering scents of white roses, apples and wildflower honey. The wine feels gracious, perplexing, intense and pure. —J.G.

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The wines in this newsletter were chosen by our editors, from our tastings for the October 2020 edition. After our editors made their selections, we offered wineries the opportunity to promote their Best Buy award with a bottle image and brand links.

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This story appears in the print issue of October 2020.
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