The EGW, or Extremely Good White, is produced each year from the Willamette Valley barrels that demonstrate the most compelling mineral depth and site expression within the 00 Wines Chardonnay programme, sitting immediately above the VGW in terms of concentration and ageing ambition but below the Hermann Family Cuvée series of single-vineyard ultra-prestige bottlings. Pierre Millemann’s French consultancy, with its grounding in the reductive, minimalist traditions of DRC and Domaine Dujac, gives the EGW a character that has repeatedly been compared by critics to white Burgundy at Premier Cru level.

The 2023 vintage was characterised by steady ripening and beautiful natural acidity across the Willamette Valley, a year that lacked the dramatic recovery narrative of the miraculous 2022 vintage but produced wines of exceptional clarity and precision. For the EGW, where the emphasis is always on the most mineral and structurally defined barrels from the vintage, 2023 provided ideal raw material: clean, focused and with the natural tension that the best Eola-Amity Hills and Chehalem Mountain Chardonnay sites routinely achieve in well-balanced seasons.

The 2023 EGW in magnum format represents one of 00 Wines’ most ambitious collectables: a wine of genuine Burgundian structural ambition produced from Oregon’s finest Chardonnay sources, in a format designed for ageing over a decade or more. The house’s growing international recognition, underpinned by perfect and near-perfect scores across the Hermann Family Cuvée tier, has substantially increased demand for all wines in the portfolio, making magnums of any EGW increasingly difficult to source outside of direct allocation.