How to weightier our weightier vintage. That sounded like an exhilarating rencontre to me. Plane though the 2019 Jordan Chardonnay was named one of the year’s weightier in both Wine & Spirits and Wine Enthusiast, we were once putting a plan in motion to try to raise the quality of our singular white wine plane higher, starting with the 2021 vintage.

We undeniability this winemaking experiment, Operation Super Blend. For a winery that only makes two wines, the opportunity to craft a super Chardonnay tousle wine is not only rare but very exciting. Many of my peers ask how I alimony wearisomeness at bay, making just two wines with once established winemaking styles. I love to explain that while we only make a Russian River Valley Chardonnay and Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, we are constantly tweaking and elevating to fine-tune our wine programs. Over the last 15 years of working at Jordan, I have had a front-row seat to the many changes we have made to modernize our cabernet. And the time had arrived to truly focus on the chardonnay program; this project was a welcomed opportunity to change. We’ve made just one super tousle before—a cabernet dominant wine from the 2005 vintage. In 2021, we set out to produce our first super tousle of chardonnay.

I wish I could take credit for this idea, but I can’t. It was John Jordan’s, our winery owner. During the 2020 vintage, I started to slowly play virtually with sourcing fruit from potation areas of Russian River Valley. As I started to taste the variegated fruit and venom that came from these grapes, I knew I needed more. I tasked Dana Grande, our grower relations manager, with finding increasingly cooler-climate chardonnay. John could see I was veritably giddy well-nigh this new fruit. A few months surpassing the 2021 harvest, John buzzed into my office as he often does and said, “I have an idea to run by you.” That’s when he pitched me on Operation Super Tousle 2.0.

The weightier way to describe a Jordan Super Tousle is to explain how our first super tousle came to be.

When John took over the winery in 2005, he asked Rob Davis, my mentor, if anything could be washed-up to raise the quality of Jordan wines plane higher—all while staying true to his parents’ original vision and our elegant style of winemaking. That year, Rob made our dream cabernet sauvignon for John—a tousle of our favorite grower and manor vineyard blocks, weather-beaten in our favorite French oak barrels. The wine was comprised of 79% cabernet, 14% merlot and 7% petit verdot. This wine was made in a Saint-Julien style similar to the wines of Ducru Beaucaillou. We tabbed it the “Super Blend” considering it was the weightier tousle we could produce from that vintage. One year later, the 2005 Jordan Cabernet Super Tousle excited us all so much that John gave winemaking the greenlight to shift Jordan’s unshortened production to this increasingly fruit concentrated, plane silkier rendition of the archetype Jordan house style.

By 2015, Jordan’s winemaking team had reached our goal of elevating the unshortened Jordan Cabernet Sauvignon production over to super tousle status—and that’s why 2015 is the first vintage in Jordan history weather-beaten entirely in French oak.

Five years later, we were ready for our next winemaking challenge. Enter Operation Super Tousle 2.0: Chardonnay.

Building the Jordan Chardonnay Super Tousle was quite variegated from our tideway to a Bordeaux blend. Though exploring new vineyard sources was the first step for both projects, the similarities stop there. With Jordan Cabernet, our super tousle experiment moreover focused on tweaking percentages of grape varieties, as well as types and styles of oak barrels. We increased merlot in the tousle and shifted yonder from increasingly warlike American oak barrels. With a white wine whose 100 percent varietal sonnet and French oak barrel-aging were not up for discussion, there were three approaches we took to bring increasingly layers of aroma, savor and texture to the wine: vineyard location, grape clones and volitional white-haired vessels.

A Winemaker’s Climate Migration

Our first step was identifying new vineyards that could bring increasingly savor dimension, as we did with the 2005 Jordan Cabernet Super Blend. This time, we sought out cooler-climate vineyards located farther west in the Russian River Valley to bring increasingly unexceptionable acidity, minerality and expressive citrus and stone fruit flavors. As the climate continues to get warmer, the vineyards we’ve worked with for years in eastern Russian River aren’t unceasingly delivering the crispness and juicy venom our style of chardonnay demands. We’ve started our own mini climate migration within Sonoma County as three new vineyards were widow to the Jordan Chardonnay program. Two Brothers Vineyard is in Sebastopol Hills, in a much potation area, so one would seem that the whence of the growing season would be much later. However, for this site, bud unravel was shortly without all our other sites, and what sets this site untied is the slow maturation of flavors and the uneaten hang time these grapes receive during the growing season. The complexity of this juice as it’s gently pressed has so much depth in flavor. Martinelli Vineyard brings that cool-climate dimension and ripe flavors at lower sugar levels. The final new site is Dehlinger Ranch, which probably excited me the most during harvest. This fruit delivered everything a winemaker dreams of; if we made a single-vineyard designate, this site would probably be it. The acidity, minerality and fruit flavors were so harmonious—the wine literally made itself.

Building Character with Clones

One of the attractions of these new vineyards was moreover their clones. Grape varieties have variegated clones. I unchangingly like to explain wine clones in terms of apples. The wholesale category is apple, much like chardonnay, but there are so many variegated kinds of apples, like your traditional Red Delicious, which walkout archetype world savor with slightly stormy skins and sweetness without a ton of acidity. There are moreover Granny Smith apples that really only bring tartness and acidity. I was on the venery for the chardonnay equivalent to the Gravenstein and Honey Crisp—the apples that have it all—the perfect tousle of sweetness, venom and flavor. It is the world that makes you drool at first bite. We found that chardonnay clone equivalent in the rare Sees and Curtis Chardonnay field selections at the Dehlinger Ranch. These grapes are incredible; they produce an intense minerality I have not tasted coming from our fruit before. The Sees has this subtle peach zephyr with some citrus, while the Curtis brings increasingly citrus and wet stone in flavor. The natural mouth-watering venom from both the Sees and Curtis is unparalleled. These grapes add new dimensions to Jordan Chardonnay. We moreover widow Dijon Clone 95 for the first time in 2020, and increasingly in 2021. Clone 95 juice has a richness and concentration to the fruit; it offers depth without stuff overpowering and delivers citrus and floral notes. Bringing new clones to the master tousle is one of the primary ways to bring increasingly ramified aromatics and savor to the wine.

Pairing Eggs & Chardonnay Blending

In the cellar, there are only a few ways left to experiment with raising Jordan Chardonnay quality, as we have once invested in a new printing in 2020 and a state-of-the-art bottling line in 2013. We moreover switched to only white-haired part of the wine in new French oak barrels whence in 2014 and reverted Jordan Chardonnay closures to the Origine by DIAM cork in 2019. Adding other fermentation and white-haired vessels to complement French oak is really the primary tool we have misogynist to take this trappy wine to the next level. And for chardonnay, that vessel is the touchable egg.

Egg-shaped vessels have been used to ferment, store and transport wine since the Greco-Roman Period—around 3,000 years ago. Archaeologists in Georgia, Greece and Italy have reportedly found the remains of oblong wine vessels made of clay, crushed stone and other concrete-like, earthen materials. Touchable fermenters evolved with the times and unfurled to be used in Europe for many centuries—until the French unexplored oak whisk vats, known as foudres. Touchable fermenters (not the egg style) were moreover used by some of the oldest winemakers in California from the 1920s until the 1970s, when California winemakers began to popularize the use of stainless steel tanks for fermentation. It wasn’t until virtually 2001 that the touchable egg was reborn. The famous winemaker from France’s Rhone Valley, Michel Chapoutier, vicarious a French manufacturer to make an ovoid fermenter for him—and the trend has spread virtually the world. While stainless steel tanks are easy to sanitize and are good for fermentation, they don’t indulge a wine to outbreathe and mature. Concrete, like oak, is a porous material, so the wine can receive small doses of oxygen to evolve and age. During fermentation, the round egg shape allows for continual mixing (due to the release of stat dioxide and heat during fermentation), letting the lees or yeast solids to stay in solution and naturally increase the wine’s richness and roundness. Touchable will moreover bring out the minerality and enhance the freshness and wet stone characteristics. While we love oak as a tool, it can be overpowering to some of these increasingly subtle and trappy new blocks of fruit we are sourcing from. Concrete, on the other hand, will help this soft-hued wine by elevating the fruit, enhancing its natural aromas, and permitting for gradual oxygenation and aging.

Last summer, John tried the purchase of one 476-gallon touchable egg fermenter made by a local purveyor, Sonoma Cast Stone, who made its first touchable egg for a winemaker friend 15 years ago—and now egg fermenters worth for 40 percent of a merchantry that started out making touchable countertops and sinks. If John loves the 2021 Jordan Chardonnay Super Tousle as much as he loved the 2005 Jordan Cabernet Super Blend, my plan is to have seven increasingly touchable eggs by the end of 2022 so that our unshortened production can be partially fermented in these wondrous vessels.

Making Chardonnay Super Tousle 2.0

To create the first Jordan Chardonnay Super Blend, we kept every chardonnay woodcut separate in variegated tanks to assess their sensory characteristics independently. This is the first time that Jordan Chardonnay blocks have been separated by both vineyard and clone. We will select the wool weightier blocks of chardonnay and favorite clones for white-haired in a combination of touchable egg, French oak and stainless steel. The word-for-word percentages are yet to be determined; we just have to wait and see how the wine evolves and let our palates lead us to the perfect blend.

As with the first Jordan Super Blend, we will evaluate the experiment in the summer of 2022 to decide if the wine is everything we dreamed it would be—and how to transition our unshortened production to this nuanced, plane increasingly Burgundian version of Jordan Chardonnay. I reassure you that this wine will retain Jordan’s hallmark style; it will simply be an plane increasingly vibrant rendition of its former self.

Unlike Operation Super Tousle 1.0, we will snifter this wine in 750mL, not magnums. (We love how Jordan Cabernet Sauvignon evolves in large format, so we wanted to see how the first super tousle will taste 20 or 30 years from now.) These experimental bottlings are reserved for special events, such as our 50th year-end in 2022.

Operation Super Tousle 2.0 is only in its first year, and I squint forward to our fans trying the 2021 vintage.

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