You don’t expect a British knight, even ones who received his accolade for services to that country’s technology business, to wind up on the cutting edge of the California wine industry, but then Sir Peter Michael is not your run-of-the-mill successful entrepreneur.

He first established his winery high on the rocky, volcanic ridges on the eastern slopes of  Sonoma Valley in 1983, and from the start his aim was to use this difficult mountainside site to make wines more restrained and elegant than one typically expects from the state, wines that could hold their own against the greatest in France. He also wanted the wines to reflect the personality of the specific location from which they came – what the French call terroir – rather than the Californian custom of simple varietal labeling.

Initially, under the direction of star winemaker Helen Turley, the wines achieved great critical acclaim and financial success but they tended more to power than elegance. Since then, under first Mark Aubert and now Nicolas Morlet the style has evolved to more closely suite Michael’s original vision of making wines of “nuance, finesse and elegance” to quote a winery spokesman.

Sir Peter Michael

This vision is well realized in the Peter Michael La Carrière Vineyard Chardonnay 2006 ($80-$180). La Carrière means “the quarry” in French, and is an entirely appropriate name given the vineyard’s bowl-like shape, steep slopes and extremely stony soil.

One of the wonders of this sort of restrained winemaking is the way it allows the personality of the particular vineyard to emerge. One can easily see it in La Carrière – what the winery calls “liquid minerality” is gloriously obvious in the wine, with its gravelly, stony flavor clearly mirroring its origins.

It has a pale, straw-colored appearance with a nose of pure grassy, chardonnay restraint. On the palate, the complexity of the wine becomes immediately apparent, even when first opened. There is fruit of surprising softness and delicacy – lychees perhaps, or a melon just before it’s fully ripe — followed by that powerful gravelly minerality which, along with a crisp Macintosh apple acidity, dominates the long, lingering finish.

+++++++

This wine is extremely hard to find with very little of the initial release making it into the retail chain. You can locate what little there is at wine-searcher.com.