2022 Jordan Chardonnay Russian River Valley

The name gives the grape and the place; what it leaves out is how the wine was made. Our grape research says Chardonnay can go in different directions: without oak it can stay lighter, or fermented and aged in oak it can take on more weight. Official category guides list citrus and apple among the cool-weather flavors and stone or tropical fruit among the riper ones, and they add that oak and contact with spent yeast can bring toast, spice and a rounder feel, though those come from choices in the cellar rather than from the grape itself. The record does not say which path this one took, so the style is a question for a shelf attendant.

Russian River Valley, where this 2022 bottling comes from, is a growing area in Sonoma County that official regional guides tie together by the Pacific fog moving in through the river gap, cooling warm afternoons and stretching out the season, though they are careful to say the fog and the ground shift from one corner of the valley to the next. Jordan Winery traces itself to 1972, when Tom and Sally Jordan founded it. We do not have a shopper rating for this wine. The one price we saw was $49.49, in our August 2026 checks. Our 15 September 2026 check found it at none of the ten stores we track.

Jordan's own vineyard page explains the valley's cooling mechanism in more detail: coastal fog moves in through the Petaluma Wind Gap and can drop the temperature 35 to 40 degrees from the day's high, which the producer says stretches the growing season up to a fifth longer than in neighboring areas. The finished wine, Jordan says, blends about a dozen vineyard blocks from five sites on the valley's east side, planted with Dijon and UC Davis clones on vines that range from three to 35 years old in gravelly, well-drained soil. Jordan markets the wine as “not a typical California Chardonnay,” built to echo white Burgundy and meant to cellar for five to eight years; its own tasting-note copy, worded identically across both the 2022 and 2023 product pages, points to “juicy citrus, Honeycrisp apple and tangerine” with “subtle French oak notes,” language general enough to read as shared marketing copy rather than a note written for this vintage specifically. Jordan's own online shop listed the 2022 vintage at $45, a separate, dated figure from our own August 2026 store price check.

Our call: this suits a shopper buying on Jordan's own account of the vineyard and style, a fog-cooled, multi-block Russian River Valley Chardonnay the producer builds deliberately to echo white Burgundy and to cellar for years, not a quick-drink bottle. Pass if the shopper crowd is what convinces you; we have no rating on record for this wine, and the producer's own tasting-note language is shared across at least two vintages rather than written specifically for this one.

The Grocery Store Wine Desk · written Sep 16, 2026 from our research file for this wine. Numbers reflect our latest checks.