2014 Red Car Wine Company Chardonnay Sonoma Coast 750 ml

Pedigree and Value Collide in Red Car’s Chardonnay

For about 20 years, Red Car has quietly and consistently been producing sustainably-crafted, boutique gems like today’s Sonoma Coast Chardonnay, at prices that make marquee producers squirm—as Red Car’s production inches higher and the accolades keep piling on, the competition’s high-priced bottlings are gathering dust on the shelf. 

Their 2014 Red Car Chardonnay Sonoma Coast is perfectly restrained, allowing pure notes of orange blossom, white peach, and beeswax to shine.

Seven Sonoma Coast sites contributed to the 2014 Chardonnay, each farmed organically and sustainably. The grapes were then pressed, and aged in neutral French oak, producing a wine of gorgeous fruit purity. As Wine Enthusiast wrote, “this wine takes a light approach to ripeness, allowing for the tart pineapple fruit to speak quietly around an acid-driven core.” 

The quiet buzz around Red Car wines remains the same whether you ask the somms at The French Laundry or Spago, or the critics at Wine Enthusiast and Vinous: these are elegant and crisp, highly aromatic, terroir-driven wines made from some of the top vineyards in Sonoma. Winemaker Tanner Scheer faithfully translates the vineyards into the bottle here, like the best village-level Burgundy. As Vinous wrote, “there is lovely depth, creaminess and texture, but in the Red Car style that emphasizes energy and tension.” 

On any given morning, as the Pacific fog rolls through the Redwood forests on its way to blanketing Chardonnay vines in haze, the team at Red Car, led by Scheer, is hard at work pruning canopies and dropping fruit. The objective is simple: to allow these coastal sites to speak freely and dynamically, offering their unique nuances, vibrancy, and complexity to the wines they yield.

In essence, Red Car offers confident pedigree in a sexy package, at a savvy drinkers’ value price—especially when you consider the pristine, organic sites in Sonoma that go into this golden bottling.