2021 Far Mountain Chardonnay Myrna Sonoma Valley 750 ml

The 2021 Far Mountain Myrna Chardonnay is a bottle that stands with Sonoma’s best—at a price that’s half of its peers. Sourced from old, dry-farmed vines at Bald Mountain, one of the highest vineyards in the area, it was one of just four Chardonnays to make Decanter’s list of “The Best Sonoma County Wines for $50 or Less.”

Packed with beautifully rich fruit that’s still focused and refined, this Chard bursts with lemon curd, white peaches, and green apples, finished with a whip-crack of citrus oil and minerality and touched with oak. It’s a reminder that great wines come from great sites—and they can be a great value, too. 

Bald Mountain Vineyard is one of Sonoma’s great vineyards. Rugged and dramatic, it’s a site that winemakers look at and instantly covet. It’s planted on the second-highest peak in the Mayacamas Range that separates Napa and Sonoma, with vines planted on fractured basalt, which has the perfect amount of friability for drainage, yielding mountain-fruit intensity.

The site was planted in 1972, long before Sonoma wines became fashionable. Those plants are gnarled and thick now, with the low yields and intensely concentrated flavors that only come with mature vines. Add in dry farming, which results in smaller berries with thicker skins. This practice cranks up flavor at the expense of volume—in fact, Bald Mountain has produced some legendary bottles over the years, like Thunder Mountain’s epic (and epically labeled) wines from the 1990s.

Throw in the extreme diurnal shifts from the altitude, which lock in freshness and allow Far Mountain to hang grapes to luscious perfection—there’s always going to be enough brightness to balance out the power in the finished wine.