2025 MarBeso, Aligoté, Sta Rita Hills AVA, Santa Barbara County.
The beautifully stylish and Burgundy like, slightly reductive, Sta Rita Hills Aligoté from Marbeso (Kiss of the Sea) and winemaker Colin McNany is a hand-crafted three barrel white wine with true varietal character, terroir driven freshness and crisp mineral detailing, showing lemony citrus, green apple, bitter peach fruits, as well as yeasty almond paste, faint white flowers, wet stone and verbena notes. This light/medium bodied Aligoté, which was whole cluster pressed and cold settled before seeing a barrel fermentation in used French oak barriques with no malos. This wine was lees aged and kept topped up to give those reductive, delicate matchstick notes, and provide incredible freshness, making this pale straw/gold Aligoté extremely compelling, distinctive and impressive in the glass. I had not had a chance to try these MarBeso wines before, and they are absolutely excellent offerings, these are wines I highly recommend searching out and I suggest joining their mailing list as soon as possible. It was a pleasure t go through each of the Marbeso wines and get the inside scoop from winemaker Colin McNany, who gave me some insight into the individual vineyards and winemaking process, so I could get a full understanding of what I was sampling, in particular here with his Aligoté, an alternative white Burgundy grape, and a rarity in California. This Sta Rita Hills bottling, which sees a cold wind swept terroir and sandy soils, is one of my favorite California Aligoté wines.
MarBeso is a limited-production, cool-climate California central coast winery in the Sta Rita Hills area making small lot wines like this one, made from Aligoté, and Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Syrah sourced from single vineyard sites in Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz Mountains. MarBeso Wines was founded in 2019 by the husband-and-wife winemaking team of Colin and Hannah McNany, and is dedicated to low-intervention, acid-driven, lower-alcohol wines, again as seen here, that reflect the strong coastal influences of the vineyards sites. Colin and Hannah decided to launch their own label after years, or decades of making wine for other people. This year will mark Colin’s 20th vintage as a winemaker, with his past experiences ranging from Leeuwin Estate in Margaret River and Martinborough Vineyards in the North Island of NZ to the California coast, which is his true home and where his heart lies. You can actually taste the passion and commitment in the wines here, I was thrilled to meet up with Colin and taste through his latest set of offerings at the Big Sur Food & Wine Festival, all of which, as mentioned, were stunning efforts, especially his Spear Chardonnay, the Syrah, the perfumed Santa Cruz Mountains Pinot and this brilliant Aligoté! As noted recently in reviews of Aligoté wines, this grape, most famous in the Bouzeron AOC, once only an after thought varietal in its homeland, is really having its moment in the spotlight and is gaining a big enthusiast following, much like Chenin Blanc has in recent years.
($52 Est.) 93 Points, grapelive