Kistler bottles more Chardonnays than most people can keep straight, and every one of them grows from the same plant material. Since the mid-eighties the estate has worked with a single heritage Californian selection, a Burgundian clone that reached the state early last century, and has planted it across sites in Carneros, Sonoma Valley, Russian River Valley and the Sonoma Coast. Which means the gap between one bottling and the next cannot be explained by the vine. It has to be the ground.
That is a harder position to hold in California than it sounds. Chardonnay here is usually judged on cellar decisions: how much new oak, how much malolactic, how long on lees. Kistler spent decades quietly removing those arguments too, pulling new-barrel percentages down from the levels that made its reputation in the nineties. The wines are still among the richest in Sonoma. They are just no longer rich because of the barrel.
Kistler
Steve Kistler founded the place in 1978 with Mark Bixler and ran the winemaking until the end of 2017, when Jason Kesner took over production and farming after nearly a decade as his assistant. Handovers at cult wineries usually come with a stylistic lurch. This one did not, largely because the house had already defined itself as a farming operation with a cellar attached rather than the reverse.
You can read the result off the scoreboard. Femente tracks 28 wines under the Kistler name, and the Hyde Vineyard bottling has reached 100 points with critics, grown from the same clone that fills the cheaper cuvees. Taste two of the single-vineyard Chardonnays side by side and the exercise stops being about a producer's style at all. It becomes the cheapest terroir lesson on offer in California.
