2018 | Red Car Wine | Chardonnay

This wine deftly combines classic aromas and flavors of tart apple and mineral nuances. Serve it with grilled halibut in a light wine reduction sauce. Deliciously crisp in tangerine, this lovely white features a pear-like creaminess on the midpalate, a complex complement that tangles through structured, nuanced elegance.

Reviews:

• Vinous: The 2018 Chardonnay (Sonoma Coast) is a very pretty appellation-level wine. Citrus peel, wild flowers, sage and mint are some of the many notes that add character. The Sonoma Coast Chardonnay nicely balances savoriness, minerality and fruit, all in the mid-weight understated style readers have come to expect from Rec Car, but with a bit less austerity in than in the past.

• Jeb Dunnuck: Starting with the 2018 Chardonnay Sonoma Coast, this light gold-hued 2018 offers lots of crushed citrus and stone fruit notes as well as a touch of white flowers and spice, medium body, a light, elegant texture, and a great finish. It's a balanced, elegant, classy Sonoma Coast Chardonnay to enjoy over the coming 2-3 years.

Producer Information

I started collecting wine in 1997 when Mark Estrin, my future business partner, revealed the joy in sharing a great bottle of Syrah. His precise palette, extensive knowledge and ability to describe the subtle nuances of wine made him a respected merchant and the perfect mentor. One afternoon we shared a bottle of Hermitage from the legendary Northern Rhone producer, Jaboulet. The complexity of the wine stunned me, it was rich, deep and concentrated, the aromatics vibrated with licorice, tobacco, olives, earth, iron, blackberries and flowers. I have loved Syrah since that moment, and it turns out, that moment changed my life. Two years passed and Mark approached me with a proposition; he and a friend, Carroll Kemp, planned to try their hand at winemaking and thought I should join them. I was pretty sure it was a dumb idea, but I liked Mark, and I said yes. It was a low budget project with big ambitions—we purchased a ton of Syrah, a fermentation tank, an oak barrel—and set out to make wine. Our first vintage, the year 2000, consisted of 50 cases of Syrah produced in a Culver City garage. The label featured a drawing of an old Los Angeles Pacific Electric Trolley Car and the words “Red Car” in a bull’s-eye. In a prior life Estrin had been a screenwriter and Kemp had been a film producer. The highly stylized approach to our early marketing married Mark’s background as a writer and his experience selling wine. From then on, the back label of each wine carried lines of prose written by Estrin: one passage per vintage, each offering a new chapter in an ongoing 1940s era noir melodrama. “The Window” was surprisingly good—a view shared by several of Mark’s friends who, conveniently, were sommeliers. These early supporters added the wine to their lists at The French Laundry, Spago, Charlie Trotter’s and several other highly respected restaurants. The first 50 cases sold quickly, and we declared ourselves a “business.” Production moved from the garage to a custom crush facility in Santa Maria and we retained wine maker Tim Spear as an adviser. For the next three years Mark, Carroll and Tim sourced fruit from a number of vineyards and made wines that met with critical acclaim from Robert Parker, who praised the Syrah writing “Red Car has the Midas Touch when it comes to producing wines of character and richness.” Encouraged, we added a new wine to the lineup, a Syrah we named “The Fight”. For each vintage we commissioned an original painting for the front label and a serialized installment written by Estrin for the back. The packaging took almost as much work as the wine.

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