2018 Bernardus Winery Ingrid's Vineyard Chardonnay Carmel Valley 750 ml

The 2018 Bernardus Ingrid's Vineyard Chardonnay is a scintillating high-water mark of Central Coast elegance, available today at an extraordinary price. Each sip, filled with honeycomb-tipped heft and crisp acidity, leaves you wondering why you’re not drinking it every week.

The reason is simple: Most of this benchmark California Chardonnay is spoken for before the labels are even slapped on the bottles. A tiny heritage site that sits at the very heart of the Bernardus estate, Ingrid’s Vineyard has just 3.5 acres planted to Chardonnay. Lying within nine miles of the Pacific, yields are so low that total production often tops out at 200 six-packs per year.

We’ve been selling Bernardus’ spectacular appellation-level Pinots and Chardonnays for five years to rave reviews, and even we couldn’t get this single-vineyard legend—until now. When veteran winemaker Dean De Korth invited us out to taste the 2018, we did a silent first pump in the air. Once we heard the terms—which involved cases from an overseas deal that fell through—a four-letter exclamation escaped our lips.

We rolled up a little after 5 p.m., just as Dean was finishing work on the bottling line. Dean’s a quiet innovator who’s done stints at some of Burgundy’s most famous wineries: Olivier Leflaive, Domaine des Comtes Lafon, Domaine Pierre Morey. He pushes himself every year to experiment with fermenting and aging, utilizing his discoveries in ever-evolving marquee bottlings like this one.

“When I tasted this last year, I wrote on my tech sheet ‘ripe, tropical fruit, ginger cookie notes,’” he said as he splashed a few deep-gold ounces into our glasses. “But as I’m tasting this now, it’s way crisper and leaner than I remember. It’s got richness, but at the same time, a core of tightly wound flavor cased inside a fine acid structure.”

Credit the rare microclimate at Ingrid’s Vineyard, which feels like a brisk October afternoon year-round. Ocean breezes keep the grapes pristinely fresh and gently dancing on the vines, but since the site sits just outside the fog area, it basks in long hours of sunshine during the day. The soil runs deep with well-draining, decomposed granite, allowing roots to stretch out underground, tapping into a mineral substrate that supplies beautiful wet stone notes.

The result is Chardonnay that’s thrumming with New World energy, and Dean slows the speed down with a Burgundian script: whole-cluster pressing and barrel fermentation in French oak that load powerful muscle onto this fine-boned beauty. It’s a can’t-miss classic at a one-time price.