Marty Winters & Alex Pitts

Lip-smacking ripeness of an heirloom peach with the parmesan-tinged savoriness of the Loire Valley greats. Cap gun smoke, wild honey, and other memory-soaked aromas.

Chenin blanc, with its amplified minerality, may be the closest thing the wine world has to existential despair. But as we know, from sorrow springs the most exquisite kind of beauty. This notion is not lost on Alex and Marty, winemakers and co-owners of Maitre de Chai, who named their Chenin Blanc after Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish father of existentialism, who called melancholy “the most faithful mistress I have known.” Alex and Marty source their fruit from Saini Vineyard, a two-acre block of dry-farmed Chenin Blanc in Sonoma’s Dry Creek Valley, planted in 1981. The wine was fermented with native yeast and aged in neutral oak barrels for 11 months. Minimal Sulfur additions at bottling.