Eight Years in Someone Else's Cellar

Ferren is a young label with a long apprenticeship behind it. Matt Courtney founded it in 2013 with David Wherritt, after eight years making wine at Marcassin alongside Helen Turley — which is to say, after eight years inside one of the most stylistically committed cellars in California. A Marcassin stood on the same counter that night, which made the lineage hard to ignore.

What is interesting is how little Ferren sounds like an heir. Courtney’s stated position is close to the opposite of a house style: he wants the wines to be unique to their sites rather than recognisable as his. The farming is organic, fermentations are native, and in the cold coastal cellar they simply take as long as they take — sometimes running through the winter, monitored slowly rather than pushed.

The Far Coast

The vineyards are the argument. Ferren works high, exposed sites on the far Sonoma Coast — Silver Eagle, at around 1,500 feet above the Pacific; Volpert, in sight of the ocean; Lancel Creek and Frei Road — places that were until recently written off as too cold to ripen anything reliably. That is not a small caveat. Courtney has accepted that some sites will not give a wine in some years at all.

The bottle here is the Sonoma Coast Chardonnay, which is not the leftovers: it is a blend drawn from barrels of those same single-vineyard lots. In a house built on site expression, the appellation wine is where the sites get to talk over each other, and it is often the most useful bottle for understanding what the cellar is actually doing.

In the Glass

Three years from the vintage, poured at a counter, and still tightly wound. The colour was pale, barely more than green-gold. The nose came in narrow and cool — lemon pith, white flowers, something closer to wet stone than to fruit — and the oak was present only as texture, not as flavour.

The palate is where the coast declares itself. Tangy, linear acidity runs straight through the middle, and behind the citrus there is a saline, oyster-shell edge that Courtney himself points to as the signature of these sites. There is real weight to the wine — it is not austere — but the weight sits low, under the acid rather than in front of it. The finish is long and dry and slightly bitter in the way good Chablis can be, and it kept lengthening over the meal rather than fading.

2017 in California is remembered chiefly for the October fires, which arrived after most Chardonnay was already picked. In the glass, none of that was legible. What was legible was a young wine that had not yet decided to be generous, and was clearly in no hurry to.