chardonnay Reviews
St. Helena Star / Napa Valley Register / September 22, 2011
"Wine of the Week: Smith Madrone 2008 Chardonnay Napa Valley, Spring Mountain District"
"...The 2008 Smith Madrone Chardonnay ($30) has deliciously ripe fruit structured by a light toastiness. It’s hard to tell where the fruit ends, the minerality picks up and the rich toastiness finishes, it is so well made."
-- Catherine Seda, the Star's tasting panel writer
Enobytes.com / Pamela Heiligenthal / August 2011
...An extreme pleasure..great balance, acidity and viscosity.
2008 Chardonnay
This wine was an extreme pleasure..the finish was long, plush and very texturally pleasing. Culinary applications are very broad and a stand-alone sipper...Marc Hinton You can taste the vintage in this wine..a wine with intense flavors..interesting and fun, this barrel-fermented Chardonnay is citrusy and tropical with hints of apple and almond..leaning towards a Burgundian style with great balance, acidity and viscosity. ..tuna tartare...crab cakes...
August 24, 2011
Wine and Spirits Magazine June 2011
93 Points
2008 Chardonnay
This bares its mountain toughness in the middle, where it's a bit foursquare, driven by foresty apple scents and minerality. Then it lasts on a delicate peach perfume -- as if it's very masculine until it's feminine. The wine's earthiness lends restraint to the fruit character, keeping it savory even as the flavors last and bringing that pretty peach fruit to the back of the finish. An ageworthy chardonnay.
Wine Enthusiast Magazine / May 2011
92 Points
Smith-Madrone 2008 Chardonnay (Spring Mountain); $30. Shows the bone-dry, crisply acidic minerality of the winery’s Chardonnays, a brisk, elegant wine whose complexities make it fascinating. The lemon and lime flavors are enriched with a touch of oak and lees. Try aging for six years to experience an aged California Chardonnay. —S.H.
OrangeCoast.com/ The Grapevine / Anne Valdespino on Fine Wine
"Outstanding..sip after sip you just can’t get enough!"
An outstanding chard I tasted recently came from Smith-Madrone. Their Spring Mountain District 2008 Chard left me craving more. The fruit is big but regal, the wine is oaked but not overly so. There's some citrus but it's balanced by orchard fruits. Sip after sip, you just can't get enough.
Fred Koeppel, Bigger Than Your Head Blog, April 3, 2011
“...Mountain-side Powerhouse ...Excellent”
Chardonnay 2008
I was amazed that this chardonnay, which exhibits so much of the grapeʼs purity and intensity, went through full barrel-fermentation and aged 11 months in oak, amazed because you sense the oak, in the wineʼs proportion and firmness, much more than you actually smell or taste it... The wine is taut, almost demanding, with tremendous acidity and limestone-like minerality, yet its suppleness and yielding nature are frankly irresistible; itʼs a mountain-side powerhouse of vital and vibrant dimension married to the utmost delicacy of detail. Not to be overlooked by devotees of expressive and individually crafted chardonnay. Production was 790 cases. 14.4 percent alcohol. Excellent.
California Grape-Vine Newsletter / Feb/March 2011 Issue
2008 Smith-Madrone, Spring Mountain District, Napa Valley ($30) – Medium-light golden yellow; attractive, floral, green apple aroma with lemony notes and a hint of coconut; medium-full body; crisp, slightly toasty, spicy, apple and citrus flavors; lingering aftertaste. Highly recommended. 14.4% alcohol; 790 cases; 100% Chardonnay; 100% BF; % ML not available; released December 2010. (Group Score: 15.8, 0/2/0; My Score: 16.5 [88/100], eighth place)
Colorado Wine News - (April-June 2008, Vol. 18, No. 2)
2006 Chardonnay was barrel-fermented, spent eleven months in oak, and has a restrained nose of pear, apple, pineapple, mineral, and a hint of well-integrated oak. All repeat as flavors laced with nice acidity and finish broad and very long with the addition of sweet orange. Unusual, attractive and built to age, it is well-balanced, structured and integrated. It will pair well with food. Very Tasty to Good.
May
2008
2006 Chardonnay 92 points
Dry, crisp and minerally, this Chardonnay has intensely pure flavors of ripe white peach, pear, green apple and pineapple that have a stony scour of cold steel. It's the opposite of the modern style of oaky fruit bomb Chards, with an elegant integrity that's food-friendly and ageworthy. Fine now, and should do interesting things for a decade. Editors' Choice
ON WINE -- ROBERT WHITLEY
Napa excellence doesn't have to be a bank-breaker
January 18, 2007
...The chardonnay is tightly wound and delicate but delivers exceptional fruit intensity and shows only a light touch of the oak.
©Copley News Service
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060118/news_lz1f18whitley.html
Peter Hellman, "Missing in Action," Urban Vintage, New York Sun, October 4, 2006
The choice of wines available in New York shops is vast, even overwhelming. Yet, amid such a global bounty, one of California's most distinguished wineries is glaringly absent on retail shelves. It's called Smith Madrone, now in the midst of its 35th vintage high on the upper slopes of Spring Mountain high over the Napa Valley. That this label can't find a place in any New York shop is not, I believe, due to lack of quality or value. It's because of the difficulty of selling the kind of wines that Smith Madrone makes.
The winery, owned by brothers Stuart and Charles Smith, bottles just three wines: cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, and riesling. In an era when most California wines are riper and more alcoholic than ever before, the Smith brothers make traditional wines, maybe even throwback wines. They're dry-farmed for intensity and harvested ripe, but not overly so. The result is wines which have alcohol between 12% and 13%, once a common level but now the exception in an era of wines that routinely reach 15% alcohol or higher. "Some of these huge wines can be seductive and fruit forward, or they can hit you so that your eyes bulge out, but then you say, ‘Now what?' They've nothing behind them. These wines will not age." Meanwhile, these voluptuary wines do fetch high scores from wine critics, notably Robert M. Parker Jr. in his Wine Advocate newsletter.
Smith Madrone wines, especially the cabernet sauvignon, are typically unyielding upon release. But the wines invariably blossom as the years go by. I don't believe there is any other dry California riesling that is the equal of Smith Madrone's in its improvement after 10 years and beyond. But such wines are a tough sell. "For many years, we've tried to make wines with elegance, restraint, and grace," Mr. Smith said, "and we got our brains beat out in the marketplace."
Sadly, that's currently the case in New York, although the wines are available in half a dozen other states, notably Illinois and California (check wine-searcher.com) and direct from the winery (smithmadrone.com). The deeply flavored 2003 Napa Valley Chardonnay ($27) and 2001 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon ($38) are currently available, as is the 2000 Napa Valley Riesling ($50). This last wine, simultaneously floral and earthy, is what great Alsacian-style riesling is all about.
