2024 Anonymous Wine Collective Russian River Valley Chardonnay

Staff Reviews

AH

Aaron Hughes

Aaron Hughes

Review Date: 07/2025

This is our second round of these Anonymous Wine Collective offerings, and honestly I'm super psyched for these. Last time the wines were great, they sold amazingly, and I heard a lot of really incorrect guesses for what they were, it was great all around. This time however, our Domestic Buyer Extraordinaire, Ryan Woodhouse, was much more involved in the actual process of putting these wines together into what you've been presented. This Chardonnay is nothing less than amazing, the nose is really pretty with white flowers surrounded by a very classic sweet green apple and lemon, with a backbone of softly toasted oak and oak spice. The palate, however, is where it really shines. There's this amazing mouthfeel that's lush and opulent and just tastes expensive. More of the same sort of more crunchy green apple, lemon, and more of that toasty oak but with nary a smidge of butter to be tasted, instead there's a really nice line of acidity brushing through the whole thing. This is absolutely amazing and if these are the quality of wine that we're going to be offering through the Anonymous Wine Collective, just wow color me super impressed.

Notes

The Anonymous Wine Collective is a dynamic range of wines made in collaboration between K&L and some of the most famous and critically acclaimed wineries in the biz. Some releases will be purely opportunistic, one-off wines, never to be repeated. Others will be ongoing collaborations where we work in tandem with world-class winemakers to make wines each year. The 2024 Anonymous Russian River Chardonnay was made for us by one of the most highly regarded and critically acclaimed winemakers in the country. The wine comes from two highly renowned vineyards in two different sub-regions of the Russian River. One vineyard is out near the small town of Occidental. The mature vines are grown in very powdery, moondust-like Goldridge soils. This vineyard is one of the most highly acclaimed in the region. The second portion of the blend is from a vineyard in the hills above the famed Westside Road,where a who's who of the most famous estates in the region are located. Here the soils are more gravelly with some volcanic elements intermixed with the coarse loam. Fruit was carefully hand-picked at night. Whole-cluster pressed, fermented with native yeast in French oak barrels (25% new), and rested on its lees for 10 months.