A single-block Chardonnay — 1.25 acres of clone 15, Block R2 — from a vineyard planted in 1997 by Richard Sanford, the man behind Sanford & Benedict, which La Rinconada sits right next door to. That's about as close to the source of Sta. Rita Hills Chardonnay as you can get, and Justin Willett handles it with almost no intervention: hand-harvested fruit, whole-cluster pressed, native yeast, no bâtonnage, full malolactic, and mostly neutral barrels, bottled unfined and unfiltered. Willett founded Tyler in 2005 with eight barrels borrowed in the corner of another winery; two decades on, he and his crew still farm these sites themselves, and there's deliberately no recipe in the cellar — each vintage is meant to read as a straight snapshot of the year. The Monterey shale and clay loam soils here give the combination of power and cool-climate freshness that makes this corner of Santa Barbara County so compelling. Willett's Burgundian instincts aren't an affectation, either: he consults closely with Etienne de Montille and Rodolphe Peters of Champagne Pierre Peters, with whom he co-founded the Sta. Rita Hills project Racines ("roots"). For anyone who thinks California Chardonnay means oak and butter, this is the rebuttal.