The new vintage of one of our favorite Holiday Chardonnays! Toybox, how apropos. This is another one of these ‘If we tell you who made it, we’ll have to kill you’ type of offers. But hey, there’s a reason behind these sorts of things, the wines are insanely good, and the prices are insanely good.
We will tell you we are fine friends with the purveyor of today’s wine and have known him for many years. He’s worked his way through the rank-and-file positions in wine and now is a National Vice President working with several of the hottest wineries in America today. And he’s also a genuinely nice guy...we’ll leave it at that.
His experience in the industry has allowed him, like others, to figure out what is actually a great wine. He’s tasted them, bought them, sold them at a high level…he just knows. So when he decided to put together his own label, it was, as he writes, “…born from a desire for something different, something better than what we were being offered. One afternoon in 2006, while sitting at the table with close friends and family, inspiration fueled by entrepreneurial spirit and a fair amount of wine, the decision was made that we would embark on this journey and make this dream a reality.”
Thus, Toybox was born. Our friend hooked up with winemaker Reid Kinnett. Reid found his love for wine during his first career as a server, bartender and retailer right here in Southern California. He then went to San Luis Obispo, where he earned a degree in Wine and Viticulture from Cal Poly. Since then, he has completed harvests in Argentina at Viña Cobos, as well as Flowers and Marcassin in Sonoma County. Besides Toybox, Reid also mans the barrels for several other boutique operations over the hill in Sonoma County.
Reid’s style of Chardonnay is one we can really get used to. He’s looking for richness and intensity, but not for any of that to be conveyed by oak. Accordingly, the Toybox Chardonnay Sonoma Coast 2024 was fermented entirely in three year old French oak barriques, no new oak was used. Now, that’s not to say this wine doesn’t have ‘oak’ in the flavor profile mind you, it just isn’t the dominant theme. The hints of wood are there as a complexity, not the overriding theme.
The fruit was sourced from the Hall Road Vineyard. This vineyard parcel, in western Sebastopol is right next door to one of our favorite producers on the planet, Walter Hansel, and is planted to the Wente heritage clone, originally brought from Burgundy in 1912 and recognized for its unique fruit and floral characteristics. The Chardonnay was barrel fermented in those aforementioned older oak barrels, underwent partial malolactic fermentation and was bottled unfiltered. A whopping 95 cases (four barrels) were produced! | | | And we bought half his production. We adore this wine. It just sits right in that pocket for us, vibrant, flowery, with engaging tropical fruit flavors, a touch of green apple, the Wente clone here is really expressive. Plus there's a wonderful, quite Burgundian (we used the 'B' word) rosemary note that we've seen in wines such as Catena's White Bones or the wines of Ramonet, though here its working on a milder level. I guess doing the dirty work for a harvest at Marcassin taught Reid a thing or two!
Our secret friend knows what he’s doing, if you want something done right well sometimes you just have to do it yourself. And, since we made such a commitment to this gem he gave us a HUGE discount we can pass onto you. $60 at the winery (look it up) but for you guys we’re going to roll this one out at $24.98 a bottle! | |
|
|
