2023 Caraccioli "Escolle Vineyard" Santa Lucia Highlands Chardonnay

The 2023 Chardonnay is a broad-shouldered, powerful wine with a sensual, creamy, leesy texture balanced by racy acids and salty inflections. Driven, linear and focused, it’s a wine of excellent balance and mouthwatering juiciness. Hailing from the rockiest spot in the Escolle Vineyard, the 2023 deliver a truck load of mineral depth. The minty, lemony finish shows tension and grip that will serve this wine well in the cellar. (BN)

Caraccioli’s Escolle Vineyard is quickly establishing itself as one of the finest vineyards in coastal California. This small, family-owned estate in the beautiful Santa Lucia Highlands has earned a formidable reputation in recent years, with wines from Escolle increasingly topping vintage reports, earning massive scores, and drawing effusive praise from some of the country’s most respected critics. Now in the hands of the fourth generation of the Swiss-Italian Caraccioli family, this is a true family endeavor, with meticulous attention paid to every detail in both vineyard and cellar. Across the wines, there is a distinctive signature: concentrated, crystalline fruit, vibrant acidity, and a deeply saline mineral core. Escolle sits just a few miles inland from Monterey Bay, where cold winds funnel relentlessly down the Salinas Valley. This is a genuinely ultra-cool-climate site. The vines are planted in decomposed granitic loam on an elevated bench tucked against the mountains rising toward Big Sur, producing fruit with remarkable intensity while preserving incredible freshness and tension. Once that pristine fruit reaches the winery, everything remains small-scale, hands-on, and traditional. The grapes are even pressed in a Champagne-style Coquard wooden basket press. Caraccioli initially became renowned for its stunning sparkling wines, crafted for many years by the late Michel Salgues. While those wines remain world-class, the estate’s still wines have increasingly stepped into the spotlight - and this Chardonnay makes it very easy to understand why. Fermented in stainless steel and then aged in large-format French oak puncheons, the wine has a piercing streak of stony minerality running straight through its core. Bright, juicy citrus fruit is mouthwatering and vivid, joined by crushed quince, salted lemon, golden peach, and peach pit. More savory notes of Marcona almond, rock salt, white oak, and barley flour emerge with air, all beautifully delineated across the palate. The tension is stunning, the length impressive, and the balance between power and precision is exceptional. This is serious Chardonnay: layered, complex, and wonderfully expressive, with a personality that continues to build as it opens in the glass. It’s a wine you can study as it unfurls over the course of a meal, but it also has the structure and energy to develop beautifully in the cellar. If you haven’t yet experienced Escolle Vineyard or the wines of Caraccioli, this is a great place to start. It captures everything that has made this site one of the most exciting vineyards on the California coast - and once you taste it, all the recent hype suddenly makes perfect sense. Enjoy, cheers!