The Call That Changed Our Cellar

How 500 bottles of Oregon Chardonnay landed at Bruno

It was a Saturday night. I was half-distracted, glass in hand, when my phone lit up. LJ was calling.

Now, LJ isn’t just any winemaker. He’s part craftsman, part connector — the same guy who helped us make Forget French Bubbly. He’s got this knack for knowing exactly where the good juice hides, the stuff most people never get to taste because it’s spoken for before it leaves the vineyard.

So when he said, “I can get you a pallet of Chardonnay. Do you want it or not?” I didn’t ask for a pitch deck. I didn’t need a brochure. I just said yes.

Here’s why: the vineyard in question sits in Oregon’s Eola-Amity Hills. If you’ve been paying attention, you know Chardonnay from this region has earned a reputation as the most elegant in the country. Volcanic soils, punishing winds, cool nights — everything conspires to produce fruit with razor-sharp tension and balance. Critics are dropping 98-point scores like it’s nothing. And yet, unless you have the right people in your corner, you’ll never get close.

We were lucky. LJ opened the door. And what walked through wasn’t hype or marketing spin — it was 500 bottles of a wine that deserves to be tasted, not hidden behind allocations and auctions.

That’s the thing most people don’t see about this industry. The best wines aren’t always the ones with billboards or glossy stories. They’re the ones that never make it past a short list of insiders. And if you’re not connected? You’ll never know they existed.

This bottle breaks that rule. Hand-harvested. Aged in French oak. Orchard fruit and minerality in perfect sync. The kind of finish that makes you pause mid-conversation. The kind of wine that reminds you why we bother with any of this in the first place.

So yeah, sometimes it comes down to saying yes before you know the full story. Trusting the right people. Believing in the bottle before the label. That’s how we ended up with this Chard — and why we couldn’t be more excited to share it.

Drink Different. Or Die Bored.

Cheers,
Bruno