A nice cooler climate chardonnay that delivers a well balanced and food-friendly experience. Nice apple and pear fruit with a hint of spice and vanilla. Medium bodied and elegant.

A toasty chardonnay. Lush aromas and flavors of apple, pear, melon, caramel, vanilla. Hint of butterscotch.

Aromas and flavors of golden apples; creamy and soft.

Wine Pairing - Corn Chowder with Mint Pesto. The chowder's summer corn's sweetness is mellowed by the potato and savory stock. Presto adds complexity. Try a Chardonnay with a little oak and barrel aging, such as the 2007 Carmel Road Winery Monterey Chardonnay.

This issue boasts a bevy of top rated Chardonnays from some of California's premier producers, the abundantly fruity Carmel Road Monterey 2007.

Accessible, eminently fruity.

One of the many brands in wine magnate, Jess Jackson's ever-expanding portfolio, Carmel Road produces a Chardonnay with pear and vanilla nuances.

Fog off of Monterey bay glides up the Salinas valley each night, helping to cool grapes throughout the Monterey appellation, resulting in graceful whites like this one, with delicate notes of pear and orange.

WHITE WINES California Chardonnay THREE STARS 2002 Carmel Road Arroyo Seco

Yes, you can have richness, bold flavor and elegance in one wine and this Chardonnay pulls it off. From its ripe tropical, lemon-lime and apple fruit to its complex spice, hazelnut and mineral notes to its toasty yet mouthwatering finish, Carmel Road is one smooth ride.

Very good and a panel favorite. Oak and creamy nose with lots of butter, vanilla and some lime; lemon, apple, mango, pepper and rich butterscotch; balanced; well-made for the rich style.

A vertical tasting at Cardinale A dense and opulent wine with aromas of blueberry, blackberry, tobacco and cedar and sandy tannins that cover the tongue.

As perhaps the most important Cabernet designation in Napa, Oakville has generated some of the best Bordeaux-style blends outside of France. Only a very few of them, however, can match this label for its silky elegance. While the grapes are sourced from a variety of vineyards located both in both the Mayacamas and Vaca Mountain ranges, as well as from Peter Michael's Les Pavots vineyard, this Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot blend remains pure of flavor, with a texture that shimmers like fresh-spun silk. Winemaker Chris Carpenter has rendered a sinuous yet smooth vintage that integrates an array of essences-chocolate, currant, coffee, and exotic woods-into a luscious, gratifying whole.

A deep well of dense fruit, cool, rich, exploding with flavor into the finish. That explosion is so tied to flinty tannins that the wine stays tight, as if the bottle were blasted by a shotgun yet stood there unscathed.

*high price, high quality *deep, elegant fruit - This is the top of the top range of Kendall-Jackson's 'Jackson Family Farms Wines' and the fruit comes 79% from Napa, 21% from Sonoma with an overall blend of 91% Cabernet Sauvignon and 9% Merlot. The colour is deep & vibrant, the fruit beautifully balanced, with none of the over-extraction of many California 'super-stars', and the wine almost but not quite ready to drink.

Hints of Kijafa give the aromas an almost too sweet character when combined with the vanillin scents of the oak. In the flavors, the ripe black cherry flavors and ample presence of sweet oak again give the wine a forward, accessible character that has some appeal. Dark chocolate notes surface in the lengthy finish.

A vertical tasting at Cardinale Dark fruit notes, brown spices and a touch of sweetness with elegant tannins, this wine is still powerful after 23 years but also elegant.

This superb blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot has flavors of coffee, chocolate and vanilla, and a long, creamy finish.

It is a huge wine with big fruit and tannins. It's mostly cabernet sauvignon and has spent 24 months in new French oak.

Hefty, with lots of black cherry and berry flavors, as well as quite a lot of oak and tannin. There's lots to this wine; it just needs a few years of cellaring.

Another Wow! Wine, this gorgeous blend of Merlot and Cabernet from four different vineyards was my own pick for best wine of the tasting. It was smooth, elegant and complex on the palate, with raspberry and spice flavors that segued into a long, seductive finish. Not as heavy as some of its compatriots, it would go well with lighter dishes such as chicken or fish, as well as spicy dishes that would be piquant counterpoint to its refined nature.

Here is a wine that typifies to a "tee" the opulent, optimally ripe and highly oaked formula for success in latter-day Cabernet. From its dense, cherry-raspberry aromas to its broadly filled, wonderfully well-extracted flavors, it carries a wealth of very sweet oak spice, but it never leans so far to oaky excess that its fruit is lost. Fairly tannic and a little hot at the end, the wine is also very rich to the last, and we would expect that richness to remain throughout the called-for five to eight years of cellaring.

Has a sense of elegance. It's fun to drink, with jammy cassis aromas and flavors, plus licorice, smoke. Only the price is out of proportion.

Built for age and very much demanding of it, this big, dense, decidedly tough young wine trades finesse for sheer extract and makes abundant use of savory oak spice. Very rich, but rather rugged and fit with tongue-curing tannins just now, it is the kind of wine that will age and age without ever earning the descriptor "pretty". Still, it has the mass and muscle to team with the richest beef and lamb entrees and deserves six or seven years of patience.

Favoring the ripe, dense style so prevalent in the '92s, this wine makes its way in the world for the sheer intensity of its ripe black cherry, dried plum, herb, vanilla and sweet spice aromas and weighty, mouthfilling flavors. A bit angular towards the end, it is a wine that is less likely to evolve into classical, layered Cabernet and seems better suited to marinated meats than to the typical roasts the Cabernet accompanies so well.