Bargetto Winery

This wine comes from the Regan Estate Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where they get plenty of fog-kissed sunshine. The grapes were harvested on November 2, 2005 at a Brix of 24.1: where else but Santa Cruz do you hang Chard so long without getting raisins? It went through ML and then spent nine months in French and American oak. Relatively speaking, this Cinderella did not long slumber in the lumber. The resulting wine is a pale beauty, wearing a starched frock of pale green linen, with frills of lemony and white eyelet lace, and generously wrapped in a most ethereal chiffon. It’s way lighter in color and texture than many of her peers, but the intensity of flavors will win you over.

This beauty has lots of wonderful aromas on the nose, including pear, jasmine and lime, plus kumquat, steely minerals, apricot blossoms and flinty steel. On the palate, all that olfactory investigation is rewarded with delightfully delicious flavors of kiwi, strawberry, lime and pear tart. There is a lovely floral note to this wine that steers it like a great acid rudder through the sea of rather dominating oak.

As much as Santa Cruz Mountains Chardonnays can be hugely golden rich and as heady as a bacchanalian beach party, this is the white-gloved sorority sister with the string of super-rich boyfriends that keep driving up to her house in Aston Martins. When you ask how her life is going, she laughs and shrugs off the question with a gesture only royalty would understand. This is not a wine that will give up any secrets.

Reviewed August 23, 2007 by Laura Ness.

Other Awards & Accolades

Silver Medal -- Santa Cruz Mountains Wine Competition