Lavinea Eola-Amity Hills Chardonnay 2022 - 750ml

93pts Wine Spectator

Vibrant and flush with tension, revealing green apple flavors highlighted by lemon verbena and crushed stone notes as this zips toward the brisk finish. Drink now. 210 cases made.

Winemaker Notes

Medium straw, flecked with gold. The nose is filled with ripe peaches and cream, apple chips and a whiff of lemongrass. Lively and nervous on the palate the wine is juicy, bright, and bursting with stone fruits, green apple and tangerine. Quite fresh and appealing, flinty even, this wine will gain in complexity with bottle aging.

Bud break came early in 2022, after a warm and dry winter. March continued that pattern and then in early April we experienced a very cold air mass that resulted in frost in some vineyards. April remained cold, and wet, setting a pattern that continued into early June. The accumulation of these factors set vine growth back a few weeks and set the stage for a fall harvest.

In June we turned the corner in time for flowering, producing a very good fruit set. Heat came quickly, and with the soil full of moisture from the wetter spring, the vines grew a healthy canopy. A couple of heat events in July and August helped to keep disease pressure in check in most vineyards.

July, August, and September were all warm and dry, with a bit of precipitation around the 3rd week of September. The warm weather continued well into October creating perfect harvest conditions that allowed the fruit time to develop full maturity, exceptional balance, and complex flavors.

Winemaker Isabelle Meunier

A native of Quebec, Isabelle studied winemaking and viticulture at the University of Dijon and in New Zealand at Lincoln University before cutting her winemaking teeth in Burgundy, under the watch of fellow French-Canadian Pascal Marchand at Domaine de la Vougeraie, and at New Zealand’s Felton Road, with Blair Walter.

Marchand recommended her to Dominique Lafon to oversee winemaking at his then-new Oregon consulting project, Evening Land, in 2007. Isabelle quickly became one of Oregon’s most acclaimed winemakers. Her wines were selected for the Wine Spectator Top 100 wines of the Year from 2009 through 2015, including producing the highest rated Oregon Pinot Noir and highest rated Oregon Chardonnay ever, culminating in WS recognizing her 2012 ‘La Source’ Pinot Noir as the #3 wine in the world in 2015.

Recognition for her wines has continued with the inaugural release of LAVINEA’s 2014 vintage. Josh Raynolds of VINOUS recently proclaimed “…I’m betting that LAVINEA will, in short order, be widely considered among Oregon’s elite producers.”