2022 Vinos Finos de California Chardonnay Lasai Santa Lucia Highlands 750 ml

Flint, smoke, crushed oyster shell. The Lasai Chardonnay opens with a bracing mineral snap—the mark of a reductive winemaking style—and carries that smoky, struck-stone character clean through the finish.

It sounds like something poured from a Chablis cellar, but look again. This is California sunshine, through and through—the work of Ted Glennon, a decorated sommelier turned winemaker with a devotion to the Central Coast’s most overlooked vineyards.

The warm 2022 vintage gave Lasai extra flesh, a rich mid-palate of slick tangerine and lemon oil. The tension holds all the way through: citrus peel, saline minerality, and a bright lift that pulls you back for the next sip. It’s generous and precise at once, with none of the heavy-handed oak that gave California Chardonnay its bad name.

Vinos Finos de California is Glennon’s celebration of distinctive vineyards and an era when California wines weren’t all big, bruising powerhouses. A native of Monterey and the sixth generation of his family in the state—the first of them to make wine—he’s earned insider access to some of the Central Coast’s best under-the-radar sites.

For Lasai, he tapped a real gem: the Escolle Vineyard in the Santa Lucia Highlands, where sunny mornings and cool afternoon breezes off Monterey Bay hand the fruit its high-wire act of richness and energy. The site was first planted for sparkling wine, until Ted made the call to bottle it still—a bit of genius foresight. He named the wine Lasai, the Basque word for “a place of calm,” in tribute to the ancestors who carried his family from Spain’s Basque Country to California in the mid-19th century.

We’ve known Ted for years. He made his name about a decade ago, when Food & Wine named him one of its Sommeliers of the Year, and since trading the dining room for the cellar he’s built a devoted following—his wines poured by the glass at destination tables across the country.

The wine is 100% Chardonnay, aged in French oak, a quarter of it new, for 10 months, then given nearly three years in bottle before release. One sip shows you why the somms keep coming back.