This past week I came back from the IFWF and the KFWE, and I was so tired I was not up to writing anything. Thankfully, we had some chicken and some olive and white bean soup in the freezer, so I had little to no work to do before the Shabbos weekend. The chicken was the lemon rosemary roasted chicken of course, and the soup was the Olive white bean soup.

So, to pair with this meal, we went for a lovely Chardonnay that I had the joy of tasting last year in NY, and based on that bought a bottle sometime ago. The wine is ripe, rich, and yet controlled with good acidity and great body. The fruit is far more tropical than summer and the body and acidity and creaminess, makes for a rich and fun white wine.

Hevron Height winery is one of those highly polarizing wineries, mostly because the late Daniel Rogov was never a fan. Actually, he hated the winery and its wines. To be fair, he did like a few bottles, here and there, but for the most part – he was very down on them. That made me not interested in tasting these wines for years. I then tasted wines from Hevron Heights, here and there in the past few years, and most of the time, the wines were a complete disaster.

Well all of that has changed in the past few years, with the 2005, 2006, and 2007 Hevron Heights wines being imported by Happy Hearts imports. The wines were quite nice, not winner winner chicken dinner kind of wines, or WOW wines, but clearly far better than the earlier wines I had endured. That said, the word on the street is that wine maker helping Michel P. Murciano, the founding owner and wine maker at Hevron Heights Winery has left the coop. Still, there is yet another rumor that the new wine maker helper, is a man that I highly respect and if he can get his hands on the overall process and make it hum, we could be seeing some killer wines from this winery in the future.

The wine note follows below:

2010 Hevron Heights Chardonnay Elone Mamre – Score: A-
This is a lovely and unique Chardonnay with great aromatics all wrapped up in clear effects from the 6 months in oak. The gold colored wine’s nose screams of pineapple, bright citrus, toast, great caramel, nice mineral, fig, and guava. The mouth is rich, medium to full body, creamy, fruity, with tropical concentrated fruit, mango, peach, melon, and tart green apple that lingers. The finish is long, spicy, and rich with butterscotch, smoky notes, grapefruit, lemon, and toast.