Kendall Jackson Unoaked Avant Chardonnay California White Wine

Unoaked is the useful word in this wine's name. The official category guides say Chardonnay takes much of its character from how it is made. Kept away from oak barrels, it stays lighter. Fermented and aged in oak, it can pick up toast and a rounder feel. The same guides expect citrus and apple in cooler examples and stone fruit or tropical fruit in riper ones. The low we saw for this bottle in our September 2026 checks was $12.99. This bottle states its style right in its name.

41 shoppers have rated this wine, and fewer than one in five of the wines we cover have drawn more ratings. Their average is 4.68 out of five. The high we saw in those September 2026 checks was $22.99. As for the producer, Kendall-Jackson says it has been family grown since 1982, and its Wine Estate and Gardens is at 5007 Fulton Road in Santa Rosa, California.

Kendall-Jackson's own product page for the current 2024 vintage adds outside confirmation to the unoaked claim: Wine Enthusiast named it a "Best Buy" at 90 points in a March 2026 review, a score the producer cites on its own site. The producer traces the fruit to three coastal counties, crediting Santa Barbara County for fresh pineapple flavor, Monterey County for lemony citrus and mineral notes, and Mendocino County for juicy green apple, and lists the finished wine at 13.5 percent alcohol.

Our call: if the lighter, unoaked style the guides describe is the Chardonnay you already know you like, this is a well-supported way to buy it, with the maker's family-grown account, a Wine Enthusiast Best Buy score, and one of the larger rating pools we track behind it. Skip it when the toast and rounder weight the guides tie to oak is the point of the grape for you; this bottling's name rules out the oak, though the guides note other cellar choices can still add roundness.

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