Fait Main Toyon Farm Chardonnay 2016 | Rich, Racy Burgundian Gold from Napa

Fait Main Toyon Farm Chardonnay 2016 is a single-vineyard Chardonnay from the stunning Toyon Farm Vineyard.  So with such low yields in 2016—Touquette produced 125 cases, down from 200 the previous year.  While it’s a very good chance that beyond Fait-Main mailing list subscribers, the only owners of this Carneros Chardonnay will be our clients.

More Wonderful White Wines

Winemaker Benoit Touquette delivers rare Carneros single-vineyard Chardonnay that shimmers a beautiful lemon-gold in the glass. Perfectly balanced, revealing rich and fleshy white peach, nectarine, yellow apple and pops of fresh cut tarragon.  In addition, Fait Main Toyon Farm Chardonnay 2016 is bolstered by racy acidity that adds lightness and lift. Enveloping the fruit is delicious French oak spice, gorgeously-woven in, peeling away layers of complexity.  As a result, just seamless—a great effort by a brilliant winemaker.

Burgundian Style Chardonnay | Toyon Farm Vineyard

Winemaker Benoit Touquette has worked alongside John Kongsgaard, producer of “The Judge,” which is widely considered California’s greatest Chardonnay. He’s also spent time under the wing of Andy Erickson at Screaming Eagle and has achieved his own 100-point perfection at Realm. Touquette’s Midas touch with Napa Chardonnay is profound. Although Benoit is a native of Bordeaux, his Fait-Main Toyon Chardonnay is pure Burgundy. The perfectly balanced wine is led by rich and fleshy white peach, nectarine, followed by yellow apple and fresh cut herbs. Racy, gorgeously-woven layers of French oak, it is seamless and in brilliant harmony.

Benoit Touquette’s Napa Cabernets from Fait-Main, Teeter-Totter, Realm, Kata, and Hartwell are nothing short of world-class, marked with a clear distinction in the glass that is Benoit’s alone. But when he set out to make a Chardonnay under his Fait-Main label, he turned to a vineyard well removed from the up-valley Cabernet hotbeds that have made him famous. Fait Main Toyon Farm Chardonnay 2016 is a truly under-the-radar brilliant Chardonnay from a site that feels like it’s in another world.

Winemaker Benoit Touquette

I grew up in Lyon thinking I would become a fighter pilot or an engineer. I never considered wine until I was in Bordeaux working mobile bottling lines to pay for graduate school. The infectious passion of the winemakers I met, showing up day after day with the same fire in their eyes, blew me away. I switched my focus to oenology and completed two degrees, then left France to intern with Andy Erickson and explore uncharted possibilities in Napa Valley. I worked hard, learned from everyone, and pushed myself to deliver the kind of winemaking I believe in. I’ve never missed a picking day, and I’ll spend as much time as it takes to get the wines right. I started Fait-Main because I fell in love with a vineyard… and then another, and another. Shauna saves me from myself.