Journeyman

Liberty Wines worked with Pete Seghesio for well over a decade before he sold the family winery. He made great wines at Seghesio and is one of the nicest people they have worked with, so when word came that he was producing small quantities of a Chardonnay they got in touch and tasted it. It is, as one might expect, superb.

The fruit comes from growers he came to know across many years of criss-crossing California in search of the best grapes, which is the real asset a winemaker of that vintage carries: not a cellar or a brand, but three decades of knowing exactly whose vineyard delivers in a difficult year. The wines are made at the winery Pete now works from, in small volumes.

Seghesio itself is a Sonoma institution founded in 1895, best known for old-vine Zinfandel from plantings that predate Prohibition, and Pete led it through the period when the family name became one of the most respected in the county. Journeyman is the label of someone with nothing left to prove, working on a scale small enough to choose every parcel personally.