2018 Olivia Edmund Blue Chardonnay Napa Valley 750 ml

Last Friday, a tranquil afternoon at the office was interrupted when one of our wine team members burst in, carrying a blue-labeled bottle in one hand with the cork jammed back into the neck.

“You guys need to get as big a chunk of the 2018 Olivia Edmund Blue Chardonnay as you can,” he announced. We blinked, waiting for him to fill us in.

That our tasting panel for the day had wrapped up earlier that morning didn’t give him pause. He pulled four Riedel glasses off the shelf and started pouring the remainder of the bottle, somewhat cavalierly, on a table by the one printer in the office that does work. “This stuff is like melted gold,” he said. “Huge body, smooth and creamy as whipped butter, dense waves of papaya, mango, and pear, all kept in check by a penetrating citrus acidity, with a finish like caramelized green apple. They’re working with some blue-chip fruit, no doubt about it. It’s got that weighty, layered richness of a Ramey or Cakebread.”

A friend had sent him the bottle, which he grabbed on the way out the door to a client lunch that stretched to Mad Man-esque proportions. From a table crowded with bottles, the Olivia Edmund Chardonnay so wowed the table that he recorked it to bring back to HQ and get us on board. And it worked: the brioche, marzipan, and baked pear aromatics pulled us into the glass, and from there the rich, lush, creamsicle-like palate sealed the deal. This one was a stunner.

“I crunched some numbers on my Uber back here,” he continued. “The Blue runs $65 a bottle retail in Napa. If we can get it down to 54% off the list price for Wine Access—$30 a bottle—this will be a sell-out. With the quality of the grapes, it’d be one of the best-priced Napa Chardonnays on the market. A real hush-hush deal. I’d buy two cases myself!”

We can’t reveal much about Olivia Edmund’s vineyard sources, but they occupy some of the best sites in Coombsville, where cool bay breezes rock the grapes to sleep at night, guaranteeing slow, even ripening. Deep, well-draining gravelly loam and volcanic ash soils give this wine heft and complexity, while the ripe 2018 vintage maxed out the creaminess and rich exotic fruit characteristics. When you pay $70 a bottle for Napa Chardonnay, this is exactly the kind of lush, marvelously balanced New World excellence you expect.

The Olivia Edmund folks let us know the terms we were looking for would normally be off the table…but since a St. Helena restaurant they sold to just shuttered, there did happen to be some 30-odd cases up for grabs, if we had a way of quickly making them disappear.

Today—in a deal we can’t promise we’ll see again—just $30 a bottle for the kind of cool-climate, tropical fruit concentration that normally costs twice as much.