2023 Tabali Chardonnay Caliza Valle de Limari 750 ml

The 2023 Tabali Caliza Chardonnay from Chile’s Valle de Limari is one world-class wine. Salty, citrusy, and chalky, it earned Chilean Wine of the Year honors from James Suckling, who crowned it with a 99 point score and praised its “incredible depth and purity.” 

The source for this single-plot bottle is less than two acres in size, so precious little of it was made to begin with. Demand was already huge from top restaurants across the globe—then Suckling’s score hit. We were only able to get an allocation due to our longstanding relationship with Tabali and our members’ love for their wines. 

The Talinay Vineyard sits less than eight miles from the Pacific, with a fractured limestone soil that would be the envy of anyone in Chablis or Champagne—and the most prized parcel within Talinay is a 0.7 hectare gemstone of a site called Caliza. The climate is arid, basically a desert, but it’s a cool desert: the winds whipping off the ocean make for a long, cold growing season that has more in common with France’s great sites than most of what you think of as “normal” Chilean wine.

Winemaker Felipe Müller—a wunderkind with no shortage of accolades—has crafted a Chardonnay that captures the tension between the valley's cool coastal climate and the limestone terroir. The grapes are picked two or three weeks later than other coastal areas in Chile, thanks to the vineyard's extraordinarily cool conditions, hand-harvested into small 20kg bins to avoid any damage to the fruit.

After careful manual selection to ensure only the best fruit enters fermentation, the wine is fermented in French oak barrels from prestigious sources such as Fontainebleau, Jupille, and Vosges. The wine is then aged for 10 months in these same barrels, developing great depth and the saline, mineral character that represents the extraordinary qualities of the Talinay Vineyard. The result? “This exceptional Chardonnay embodies the vigneron spirit, showcasing the individuality from a unique coastal-desert climate,” James Suckling notes.