Williams Selyem Hirsch Pinot Noir 2014
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Connoisseurs' Guide
Winning highest honors among the splendid new lot of Williams Selyem Pinots for its vibrancy and textbook varietal precision, the winery’s best-ever offering from the Hirsch Vineyard marries classic, very pure, ripe cherry fruit with a deft touch of sweet oak and wispy hints of dried flowers. Although bright and balanced to firmness, it exhibits a little more fruity richness than other vintners manage to coax from this very cool site, and the wine’s firm spry spine is always an integral piece. It is a Pinot Noir that is guaranteed to grow with age even if there is nothing about it that dissuades drinking now, and we would not be surprised in the least if it continues to improve even as its tenth birthday nears.
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Williams Selyem Winery began as a simple dream of two friends, Ed Selyem and Burt Williams, who pursued weekend winemaking as a hobby in 1979 in a garage in Forestville, California, and made their first commercial vintage in 1981. In less than two decades, Burt and Ed created a cult-status winery of international acclaim. Together they set a new standard for Pinot Noir winemaking in the United States, aligning Sonoma County's Russian River Valley in the firmament of the best winegrowing regions of the world. Today John and Kathe Dyson, who purchased the winery from Burt and Ed in 1998, carry on the passion for Pinot Noir winemaking without compromise. As for the wines... they just keep getting better and better.
The Sonoma Coast AVA is large in area but, not counting overlapping regions like Russian River Valley, only has a few thousand acres of grapevines—and it’s no wonder. Much of the region is rugged and not easily accessible. Its proximity to the Pacific Ocean’s fog and cool breezes limits the varieties that can be cultivated, but it proves to be an ideal environment for high quality Pinot Noir.
Since fog is a frequent fact of life here, as are heavy marine layers that sometimes bring rain, the best vineyards are wisely planted above the fog line, on picturesque ridges that capture enough sun to provide even ripening. That, with the overnight drop in temperature that reliably preserves acidity, results in fine expressions of Pinot Noir that often receive tremendous critic and consumer praise alike, and are often in high demand.