2015 Saintsbury Chardonnay Sangiacomo Green Acres Vineyard Carneros 750 ml

Single-Site Brilliance in Outstanding Vintage

The 2015 Saintsbury Chardonnay Sangiacomo Green Acres Vineyard Carneros is the single-source bottling that highlights one of the Carneros region’s most fruitful partnerships: between Saintsbury—a Burgundian-style pioneer of Carneros—and the legendary Sangiacomo family, who have farmed Sonoma County for nearly a century. Green Acres, planted in 1969, is a highly prized vineyard with the likes of Acacia, Sojourn, Saxon Brown, and Ram’s Gate among those with lengthy contracts for grapes. Saintsbury has harvested fruit for 37 years from Green Acres, but the 2015 marks only the third year that this Chardonnay is bottled as a single-vineyard offering. Good timing: Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate named 2015 the highest-rated vintage ever for North Coast Chardonnay. Wine Spectator gushed over this barrel-fermented beauty, calling it “Seductive, smoky, vanilla-laced oak adds a pretty touch, joining flavors of green tree fruits, pear, apple and citrus. Maintains focus and ends long and persistent." The winery’s supply of this unparalleled vintage is dwindling. Elsewhere up to $46, we have 56 cases up for grabs at $38.99 per bottle. Shipping included on 4.

Thinking of Saintsbury and Sangiacomo, in the same place at the same time, together took us back to 2005, when we saw Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard play at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Who, when two legends like that together, gets top billing?

Better to start with Sangiacomo family, whose history in California stretches back to 1927, when the Italian immigrant Vittorio Sangiacomo purchased a 52-acre fruit tree ranch in Sonoma Valley. The family struggled through the depression, but in the following decades became the largest pear growers in Sonoma County. But as pear prices declined, the family began to look for ways to diversify their plantings. In 1969, they decided to plant grapes. The Green Acres Vineyard in Carneros was born.

In 1981, the Sangiacomos completed their transition to grape-growing, and a nascent Saintsbury winery was about to produce its first vintage. Founded by David Graves and Richard Ward, two UC Davis graduate students who shared a love for Burgundy, Saintsbury turned to the Green Acres vineyard, which was planted in part to the original Old Wente clone of Chardonnay. That vintage, Saintsbury produced the first of more than three decades, and counting, of Sangiacomo Chardonnay.

In 2015—rated by Wine Advocate as the greatest Chardonnay vintage in the history of the North Coast—Saintsbury produced its third-ever vineyard-designate Chardonnay from Green Acres. The grapes, consisting of Old Wente, Dijon, and Catarina clones planted in the sandy loam soils between Sonoma and Fowler Creeks at Green Acres, were hand-harvested in the cool night, and on the crush pad by dawn. Whole-cluster pressed, barrel-fermented and, aged on the light lees, the wine is aged in 30% new French oak. This a modern classic: a fine example of two growers and winemakers who helped make Carneros the Burgundy hotbed of California.