Picked on the Twenty-Eighth of September

Belle Côte is the oldest of the four estate Chardonnay blocks at Peter Michael, planted in 1990, mostly to Old Wente and Rued selections. It sits on the western slope of Mount St. Helena at somewhere between seventeen and eighteen hundred feet, on rocky soils of volcanic origin — rhyolite, broken up and thin — with a south-southeast exposure and a stand of trees along its western edge that takes the worst of the afternoon sun off it.

Everything about that description is arranged to slow the vineyard down. Altitude, aspect, shade at the hottest hour, poor rock instead of soil: the block’s growing season normally runs two to three weeks longer than most Chardonnay planted in Napa or Sonoma. The wine is fermented entirely with native yeast and entirely in barrel, in French oak from a handful of chosen coopers.

A Season That Refused to Slow Down

2017 in northern California went the other way. The winter had been generous with rain after years of drought, and the vines came into the season vigorous — the sort of vigour that needs constant canopy work to keep in hand. Then, after veraison, the heat arrived. The Labor Day weekend brought a record heat wave, temperatures reaching well above a hundred degrees, and white varieties across both counties ripened faster than anyone had planned for. Chardonnay yields ended down by as much as a fifth in some vineyards, and there was a good deal of triage on the crush pad.

What rescued Belle Côte was a return of cooler weather afterwards, which let the block finish at its own pace rather than the heat wave’s. Picking was completed on 28 September, a smaller crop than usual.

Ten days later, on 8 October, the fires started. By then the great majority of the region’s fruit was already in — around seventy percent of California’s Chardonnay by most counts — and this block was among it. The vintage that came out of 2017 in Knights Valley is a warm, forward one, not a smoke-marked one, and the calendar is the whole reason.

In the Glass

Three years old, opened at home on the last evening of the year, and drinking as a young wine well inside its opening stretch.

The nose was ripe and exotic before it was anything else — yellow peach, a little pineapple, then the barrel’s contribution as toasted hazelnut and vanilla rather than as sawn wood. Underneath it there was a chalky, flinty note that the block reliably gives and that keeps the richness honest.

On the palate the year showed plainly. This was a broad, fleshy Chardonnay with more weight through the middle than Belle Côte usually carries, the texture creamy from the lees work and the alcohol warm at the back. The acidity was there and did its job, but it arrived at the end rather than running the length of the wine. A generous bottle, made in a generous year, from a vineyard that had been planted specifically to resist generosity — and that tension is more interesting than either half of it alone.

Opened alongside the Dom Pérignon Vintage 2009. The estate’s red flagship, the Les Pavots 2003, came from the same Knights Valley slopes.