Before the Judgment of Paris, before Napa's cult Cabernets, there was Hanzell. Ambassador James Zellerbach founded it in 1953 with a genuinely audacious goal: to make Burgundian wine on the slopes of Sonoma that could stand next to the great whites of the Cote d'Or. Walk the vineyard today and you are walking past the oldest continuously producing Chardonnay vines in the Western Hemisphere. The Estate bottling comes from high-elevation volcanic soils in the Moon Mountain District, and that site gives the wine a stony rigor, tense and vertical and precise, about as far from the butter-bomb Chardonnay cliche as California gets. It is also famously long-lived, built with the constitution of a red wine; bottles from the 1970s and 80s are still singing.