2019 Foxen Winery Chardonnay Tinaquaic Vineyard Santa Maria Valley 750 ml

Antonio Galloni of Vinous, after saying “Foxen presents some of the most compelling wines I taste anywhere in the world,” dubbed their 2019 Chardonnay from the famed Tinaquaic Vineyard “a wine of magnificent beauty and character.” He gave it 95 points, which made it one of Vinous’s top Chardonnays of the vintage—NONE scored higher. 

It’s impossible to overstate Foxen’s importance in Santa Barbara’s wine history. Founded in 1985, their intense, balanced wines helped put the county on the map. They catapulted into superstardom after the movie Sideways, and the Tinaquaic Vineyard is their original site, planted on land that co-founder Dick Doré's ancestor purchased. 

Tinaquaic has been dry-farmed since its inception, and the low-yielding vines possess extraordinarily deep root structures. The site is perfectly situated for the warm, sunny days and cool, Pacific nights that make Santa Maria Valley special—the day’s heat brings power, while evenings allow for vibrant acidity and long hang-times. Factor in the ranch’s well-drained loam and you’ve got an ideal setting for grapes to thrive.

The planting of the 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.