The Best CA White Wine Value - Period

While 2019 was a benchmark year for the Santa Rita Hills, with monster scores in the 95+ range for the best wines, we're expecting 2020 to be even better. Which is why I’m letting you know now, rather than later, that the time to buy these 2020 wines is immediately. Other wine retailers will wait for the Wine Spectator's approval before letting you know about a new offering, but we're here in advance to tell you simply: don't wait for the press to buy these wines. Because by the time the points come in, the best bottles will be long, long gone.

Let's talk about the new 2020 vintage of Sandhi Santa Rita Hills Chardonnay as exhibit A: one of the most thrilling white wines I've tasted from California in the last year.

The press on this wine is just starting to roll out, with Robert Parker's Wine Advocate handing it a preliminary 93 point score, writing: "tones of golden apples, beeswax, brioche and roasted almonds. The medium-bodied palate offers youthful, tangy acidity and slowly emerging nutty layers, finishing energetic." For those of you who fell in love with last year's The Hilt Chardonnay like I did, this wine has the same salinity, but at almost half the price. As one friend said to me last week: "The 2020 Sandhi is the best deal on white wine anywhere in California right now." I'm hard-pressed to disagree. Other wines of this quality sell for $45-60 a bottle, yet this one is under $30.

Sandhi is the joint venture between Michael Mina wine director Raj Parr and winemaker Sashi Moorman, who made wine at Ojai and Stolpman and now runs Piedrasassi. Over the last few years, their Domaine de la Côte winery has become one of the biggest cult sensations in the state. The overwhelming majority of the fruit in the 2020 Sandhi Santa Rita Hills Chardonnay comes from the Domaine de la Côte estate, and the wine is simply electric on the palate. If you think Chablis is saline and mineral-driven, wait until you get a load of this. This is oyster wine; brimming with tangy citrus and salt. I'm so completely smitten by the combination of acid and minerality in this wine, I'm planning to buy 2-3 cases just for personal drinking.

It doesn't stop with just Sandhi, however. We have new 2020s arriving from Tyler, Liquid Farm, The Hilt, Dragonette, and more iconic Santa Rita Hills producers. Click here to view our entire selection and keep checking back for new arrivals as they come in. Because they're going to go FAST.

-David Driscoll

The New California Frontier: Breaking Down the Santa Rita Hills

One day after my lunch date with Tyler winemaker Justin Willett, I was visited by the team from Sandhi and Domaine de la Côte to taste and discuss the new vintages from Raj Parr and crew. All it took was one sip from the 2020 Sandhi Santa Rita Hills Chardonnay to send my taste buds into a frenzy and my brain into overload. The combination of ripeness with acidity, salinity, and minerality in these Santa Rita Hills wines is not just incredibly exciting, it has transformed my mindset into a hoarder-like purchasing mode, hellbent on squirreling away as much of this stuff as I can afford. Cases of Radian Vineyard Pinot Noir, scattered bottles of Bentrock Vineyard Chardonnay, and back vintages from Sanford & Benedict Vineyard, across a multitude of different producers.

I’ve been through enough wine and spirits gentrification in my career to know what the future holds for the Santa Rita Hills appellation and the Burgundian-like wines currently being produced there (for a fraction of Burgundian prices). I watched Bordeaux prices skyrocket after the 2005 vintage, ending my chances of ever affording the wines I’m most passionate about. I sat by as single malt prices quintupled over the last decade, forever changing the landscape of luxury. And Burgundy? Burgundy has become so ridiculously rare and expensive, you have to pay $100+ a bottle just to drink a village level wine from a serious producer, let alone a premier or grand cru expression. Meanwhile, prices for the very best wines from the Santa Rita Hills remain well under $100 and well within reach. But for how long? That’s the million dollar question.

Terroir, like many buzzwords, has become a bit hackneyed over the years, as just about every producer from wine to spirits to beer has stressed the individuality and quality of its local ingredients, even if those ingredients aren’t all that special. Yet, it’s still the reason why wine drinkers will and should pay an extraordinary amount for a bottle of wine. There are a million creamy and buttery Chardonnays out there, but only Chablis can taste like Chablis because of its incredibly chalky soils. Only Pulingny-Montrachet can produce wines with weight and a characteristic flintiness that thrills the palate with every sip. There’s a reason why the names of these regions and vineyards have become known to wine drinkers around the globe. They are special. There’s something magical in their geographic and geological conditions that produces complex and fascinating wines.

As I’ve been finding out firsthand over the last two years, the Santa Rita Hills vineyards are just as special in their own way. You can bet that once the rest of the world finds out just how special these wines are, availability is going to go down, prices are going to spike, and we’re going to have to fight for our annual allocations just like with every other hot genre in our industry. While collectors in Europe, Asia, the U.S. and elsewhere continue to fight over $600 bottles of Armand Rousseau Gevry-Chambertin or $1600 of Clos de la Roche, we can easily drink $35 bottles of 2020 Sandhi Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir and $70 bottles of Liquid Farm Radian Vineyard. Justin Willett’s 2020 Tyler La Encantada Vineyard is $64.99 and drinks far above any village Burgundy I’ve tasted in the last few months. These wines are right here; available. The vineyards are in our backyard, just an hour-plus away from Los Angeles.

As an AVA, the Santa Rita Hills appellation just turned fifty his year, marking the anniversary of industry pioneer Richard Sanford’s first wines from Sanford & Benedict Vineyard in 1972. As the buzz from those wines began to spread, they kept planting Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in the most rugged of locations, allowing the vines to struggle deep into the earth and soak up whatever these sites had to express. Twenty-five years later, La Rinconada Vineyard was planted just adjacent to Sanford & Benedict, and is now a name in its own right. In 2000, Richard Sanford planted La Encantada Vineyard, the first certified organic plot in the Santa Rita Hills (we have a few bottles left of the 2015 Sanford in stock now if you want to grab one). In 2007, more vines were added into the 200 acres of planted vineyard space at Rancho Salsipuedes, where Bentrock and Radian Vineyards lie. Acquired by the Hilt in 2014, we’re only now realizing just how incredible these wines can be.

Unlike Burgundy, which despite its recent surge in popularity has centuries worth of documentation for its best vineyards, we’re still discovering the great potential of the Santa Rita Hills region. New sites are still being planted. Recent additions like Tyler’s Mae Estate and the vineyards at Domaine de la Côte still have their best wines ahead of them. The time to jump into the Santa Rita Hills pool is right now. Today. Immediately! By the time you figure out what you like and what’s worth buying, you’ll likely still be able to find and afford the bottles you want. Five or ten years from now? I don’t know if that will be the case. Like I said, I’ve been through all this before. Ten years ago you could get Blanton’s whenever you wanted it, and no one really cared about E.H. Taylor. In today’s modern era, pricing and availability can change in an instant.

-David Driscoll

Catching Up With Tyler Winery

Last year, when I made several trips up to the Santa Rita Hills to tour what is, in my humble opinion, the hottest AVA in California right now, there was one particular winery I wasn’t able to squeeze onto the schedule: Tyler. Started by Santa Barbara native Justin Willett back in 2005, Tyler has been an homage to the great vineyards of the region since its inception, starting with wines made with fruit from Sanford & Benedict and Bentrock, eventually expanding into lesser-known sites like La Encantada and La Rinconada. Justin has been a champion of the Santa Rita Hills for his entire career, and it was great to finally sit down and talk about that passion in person.

Lunch was at Bottega Louie in West Hollywood. We started with pizza, then went for the salmon as we tasted through the 2020 wines: Chardonnay from La Rinconada and from the new Mae Estate that Justin and his wife purchased back in 2015. Pinot Noirs from Mae, La Rinconada, and La Encantada; all of which were unique and refined in their own way. The vintage was stunning across the board and the side-by-side comparison of the sites brought forth various explanations from Justin about production: whole cluster in this vineyard, not in this one. New oak for this vineyard, not for this one. The winemaking varies site by site, based on the needs of the wine.

As a huge Burgundy fan, Justin was quick to dissect the current state of affairs in terms of pricing and availability for France’s most famous wines, noting that the top wines of the Santa Rita Hills start to look pretty attractive at $60 and $70 compared to $600 and $700 for some of the top Burgundies. I couldn’t agree more. Ever since I started digging deeper into the AVA—trying whatever I could from Tyler, The Hilt, Liquid Farm, Sandhi, Sanford, and other top producers—my itch for Burgundy has been almost entirely satiated. It’s obviously a much longer topic of discussion than I have time for in this blog post, but it’s one I’m thinking more and more about each day. The Santa Rita Hills is our version of Burgundy here in California.

And what better pairing with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir than pan-fried salmon with crispy skin? Justin mentioned that he meets for meals and conversations with other top winemakers in the region to discuss the future of Santa Rita Hills and Santa Barbara County as a whole. “What are the wines supposed to taste like? What do we want them to be?” he asked rhetorically, as we discussed the growing awareness of appreciation of Southern California wine on a global scale. “One thing that’s really changed is its relationship to Los Angeles,” he said between bites as we tasted through the second flight; “Napa and Sonoma have always had the support of San Francisco, but LA hasn’t had the same relationship with Santa Barbara. That’s starting to change, however.”

I couldn’t agree more. As a Los Angeles resident who doesn’t plan on moving anywhere else for the rest of my life, the fact that I have this incredible wine culture in my backyard is a tremendous source of pride. My relationship with the Santa Rita Hills has grown tremendously since I relocated down south, and I’ve attempted to channel that passion into my buying here at Mission. In a few years, I can see that energy spreading into more and more Angelenos. And it’s about time!

-David Driscoll

Historic Vernaccia

Vernaccia from San Gimignano has a long history, and since the Renaissance period has been considered one of Italy’s oldest and most noble wines. Its fame has no doubt been strongly connected to its region of origin, San Gimignano – an ancient Tuscan town famed for its medieval towers. The Vernaccia wine grape is mentioned as early as 1276 in San Gimignano’s records and in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and was a wine considered to be fit for a king; Pope Martin IV in particular was said to be especially partial to eels cooked in Vernaccia.

The 2020 Selvabianca from Il Colombaio de Santa Chiara is not just a historic wine, it's one of the most delicious and food-friendly options in our store right now. Fleshy on the palate with stone fruit flavors and crisp acidity, it's more than just fantastic food wine; there's enough going to warrant a few glasses on its own. If this is your first bottle of Vernaccia, it surely won't be your last. Serve it with fish, chicken, carpaccio, or just by itself on the patio! Il Colombaio has received world-wide recognition for its wines, from Slow Food to Gamberro Rosso. The Selvabianca received the coveted Tre Bicchieri in 2019. It’s 100% Certified Organic and it’s going to be in my fridge for the next month as I just bought half a case.

-David Driscoll

Limited Radian Vineyard Allocation

Some customers here at Mission already know about my obsession with Radian Vineyard: the super-chalky, wildly-windy Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vineyard in the rugged Santa Rita Hills appellation near Santa Barbara. I'd never seen anything like it in California when I first visited last October, and I've been consumed with drinking its wines ever since.

What makes Radian wines so special? The sheer electricity. The combination of diatomaceous earth and cool mountain air creates a vibrant minerality that is completely unmatched by any fruit I've ever tasted in my 15+ year career. The Chardonnays are more Chablis-like than real Chablis. The Pinot Noirs are more complex than many Grand Cru Burgundies. The cliffs of Radian look like Dover, and the soil is full of chalk like Champagne.

Always limited in supply, our customers have had to compete with me for what few bottles we get into the store from both The Hilt and Liquid Farm, but at the moment we have a few cases in stock. As Vinous critic Antonio Galloni said in his review: "For readers who want to know what Pinots from Radian are like, well, this is a pretty great example!" Don't miss out. These Radian wines are single-handedly keeping California wine on the cutting edge of cool.

-David Driscoll, Mission Sales Director

2019 Liquid Farm "Radian Vineyard" Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir $69.99

94 POINTS: VINOUS - The 2019 Pinot Noir Radian Vineyard is a bold, luscious wine that shows the more virile side of the Santa Rita Hills. Deep red/purplish fruit, spice and exotic floral notes build effortlessly in the glass, For readers who want to know what Pinots from Radian are like, well, this is a pretty great example! -Antonio Galloni

Vinous extended notes: There’s plenty to like in these new releases from proprietor Jeff Nelson and winemaker James Sparks. The 2019 Chardonnays are all compelling. I would be thrilled to drink them any day of the week. In 2019, the Chardonnays seem especially precise, aromatic and delineated. Then again, Liquid Farm works with an enviable collection of vineyards. Pinot Noir is a more recent addition to the Liquid Farm range. Here, too, the wines are pretty strong. The Radian and Sanford & Benedict Pinots are especially fine. 

-David Driscoll

The Story of Ciacci is Incredible Enough. Wait Until You Taste the Wines

There are countless Brunello lovers around the planet who gobble up the Ciacci Piccolomini allocations each year and drink every bottle with zero knowledge of the story behind it. But if you can spare us two minutes of your time today, it's definitely one of the more incredible tales in our industry.

In the early 1900s, Elda Ciacci married Count Alberto Piccolomini d'Aragona, a direct descendent of Pope Pious II, and lived in a palace where the Ciacci estate sits today. A farmer named Giuseppe Bianchini was in charge of managing the vines, olive trees, and the rest of the 220 acre property, and he worked tirelessly on behalf of the Count until he passed, then on behalf of the Countess until her death in 1985.

Knowing her passing meant the end of an era, and of his employment at the estate, Giuseppe began to prepare for life after Ciacci until something incredible happened—the kind of miracle that only happens in Hollywood movies and fairy tales: it was discovered the Countess had willed the entire Ciacci estate, including all of the vines, trees, and buildings, to Giuseppe as a gift!

The final words of her will read: ‘I am sure that by doing this my name will be famous all over the world, because Giuseppe knows exactly what I want and he has the philosophy to produce a great quality winery."

And that is exactly what happened! Today Ciacci Brunello is revered globally as one of the finest producers of wine in all of Tuscany, and it's still run by Giuseppe’s family. With fantastic press and glowing accolades year after year, there's a reason this stuff is allocated. I buy a case of the Brunello sight unseen every vintage because while there are other great Sangioveses out there, few have the depth and elegance of these. The story of Ciacci is incredible enough. Wait until you try the wines.

2017 Ciacci Piccolomini d'Aragona Brunello di Montalcino Riserva $59.99

93 POINTS: JAMES SUCKLING - Aromas of cedar, berry, mushroom and burnt orange follow through to a full body with medium, chewy tannins and a fluid, flavorful finish. Not overdone.

91 POINTS: VINOUS - A pretty and fruit-forward display of ripe cherries, minty herbs and sweet smoke wafts up from the 2017 Brunello di Montalcino. This impresses further with a juicy, fun mix of bright red berries and confectionary spices motivated by vibrant acidity. Hints of plum and licorice linger long over a slightly gruff coating of tannins, yet in the end, balance is nicely maintained. Well done.

2017 Ciacci Piccolomini d'Aragona Brunello di Montalcino Pianrosso $79.99

94 POINTS: JAMES SUCKLING - This is a beautifully crafted and polished Brunello for this vintage, with full body and creamy, lightly chewy tannins. Dark berries, walnuts and cedar with dried-flower undertones. Needs time to soften, but very pretty.

92 POINTS: VINOUS - A nuanced, delicate bouquet of dried strawberries, roses, hints of sweet spice and crushed rocks lifts up from the charming 2017 Brunello di Montalcino Pianrosso. This is remarkably lifted, yet juicy and energetic, as ripe red berries and minerals cascade across the palate. It leaves a coating of violet-tinged florals, along with persistent raspberry and cherry tones. The tannin management here is absolutely stunning, as the Pianrosso finishes structured yet vividly fresh.

-David Driscoll

Mediterranean Climate, Mountain Air

Are you ready for an inexpensive, crisp and delicious, everyday drinker that satisfies both your taste buds and your romantic ideas about French wine?

We've got just the bottle! The 2020 Closerie des Lys "Les Fruitieres," a delicious Chardonnay-based wine from the Languedoc region near the French Pyrenees: a site with both a Mediterranean climate and mountain influence. What does that mean for the wine, you ask? It means ripeness + acidity! The warm days help the grapes reach their peak on the vine, while the cool mountain evenings help them maintain freshness. The terroir is everything!

The 2020 La Closerie des Lys "Les Fruitières" Blanc $10.99 comes from vineyards deep in the Pyrenean foothills on the sides of two mountains, and is made made with equal parts Chardonnay and Mauzac, then 10% each of Chenin Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc added for pep. Balanced from front to back across all fronts, there's no better white wine value in our store right now. Crisp, mineral-driven, fresh, and snappy on the palate, the stone fruit flavors pop on the finish. If you like unoaked Chardonnay, snappy Sauvignon Blanc, or just about any clean, vibrant white wine from France, Italy, or Spain, this is a no-brainer.

The question you're probably asking yourself now is: how do they grow it, bottle it, and ship it halfway around the world for $10.99?

To which I say: don't ask, just enjoy!

-David Driscoll

Jack Bonded

The first of two new Jack Daniel's expressions scheduled for 2022 has arrived at Mission. We're still awaiting the new Triple Mash, but for now you can feast on the 100 proof Bonded edition that's sort of like baby bear's porridge between the softer 80 proof Jack and the hotter barrel proof. The price is right.

-David Driscoll