2018 Foxen Winery Chardonnay Tinaquaic Vineyard Santa Maria Valley 750 ml

If you love opulent Chardonnay and you’re looking for thrills on the level of California’s icons, the 2018 Foxen Tinaquaic is a perfect fit.

This expertly crafted, single-vineyard, dry-farmed luxury California wine wows both critics and customers alike. Jeb Dunnuck crowed, “This rich, textured, yet still fresh and lively Chardonnay does everything right,” while Antonio Galloni of Vinous praised its “tremendous depth,” and “natural gravitas.”

The planting of Foxen’s 10-acre Tinaquaic Vineyard is the stuff of local legend. 

In the spring of 1989, Bill Wathen and Dick Doré gathered up Wente-clone cuttings from a special Santa Maria Valley site under the cover of darkness and loaded them into Doré’s old orange pickup truck. (It’s for this reason that the Tinaquaic cane-collection method is affectionately referred to as “Volar de Noche,” which translates to “fly by night.”) They planted those canes on a hillside vineyard with soils composed of clay and sand, and resolved to tend their vines without a drop of irrigation. 

Twenty-nine years later, Wathen, Doré, and winemaker David Whitehair were rewarded with one of the more remarkable growing seasons in Santa Barbara County—one that led Galloni to exclaim: “At Foxen, the 2018s are off the charts…The 2018s are exceptional and the best I have tasted from Dick Doré and Bill Wathen. Don’t miss them.”  

While summer temperatures were generally cool, steady breezes off the Pacific helped take even more bite out of the summer sun. There were no significant or prolonged heat spikes, allowing the Tinaquaic Chardonnay to fully ripen without risk of blistering or desiccation. It’s simply the kind of optimal vintage that will not only drink well now, but also over the next decade!