Lingua Franca 'Bunker Hill' Willamette Valley Chardonnay 2023

Though crisp and lean on the tongue, 2023 Bunker Hill has a surprisingly floral, marzipan, and mineral nose. On the palate it has lemon peel and citrus while the aroma of freshly
picked Provençale herbs emerges as the wine opens with aeration. There are layers of flavour in the round and luxurious finish. The
vineyard has yielded a paradox flavours on thefoundation of its usual taut restraint.

The growing season in 2023 started off with a pattern that had prevailed for the previous two years with a cold wet spring, though never with any frost. The cool spring weather led into a beautifully warm second week of May with temperatures in the mid 80s that promoted shoot growth to set up for a good
flowering in June. Though we had the occasional hot day we didn’t experience the extreme heat spikes we’d seen in previous
summers. Picking began at the end of September in ideal conditions. These promise to be among our most successful
wines ever.

100% sourced from our Bunker Hill Estate Vineyard in the South Salem Hills and is the oldest source of fruit for any of our wines,
having been planted in 1995. It is among the earliest of the Dijon-clone CH76 plantings in Oregon. The soils are thin over the basalt
bedrock and slope facing the ocean winds tothe west, making for thick skins.

96 pts - "The palate is dense and nervy with a waxy texture and a bright sense of minerality. Gorgeous now, watch this evolve over the next 15+ years.”

Owen Bargreen, September 2025

The grapes were picked to maximise freshness and tension in the finished wine. 67% Whole cluster pressed, 33% crushed and then pressed, settled in tank for 24 hours on average, then barrel fermented in a combination of 26%new, 600-litre puncheons and 74% old French oak barriques and puncheons from diverse coopers. Full malolactic fermentation completed spontaneously in each barrel. After 11 months aging on lees, the wines were combined in tank with their lees for five months prior to bottling.