Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2017 Adobe Road Pinot Noir, Griffin's Lair, exhibits excellent purity, balance, and style. TASTING NOTES: This wine is bright and alive with fresh red fruits and lively minerality. Pair it with savory lamb stews. (Tasted: January 24, 2020, San Francisco, CA)
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Wine Spectator
Richly spiced, featuring concentrated boysenberry, dark cherry and plum tart flavors that are filled with notes of baking spices. Offers a creamy texture on the finish, with chocolate mousse accents. Drink now through 2023.
Adobe Road Winery produces small lot wines from premier family-owned vineyards across Sonoma County and Napa Valley. Through collaboration and meticulous attention to detail, our handcrafted wines reflect the unique characteristics of each vineyard site in which they are grown.
Owners Kevin and Debra Buckler founded the winery in 2002, with a unique tie to the world of professional motorsports. As a championship race car driver, Kevin's passion and drive earned him over 100 professional racing victories. With that same passion and drive, Kevin is now dedicated to crafting exceptional wines that represent the pinnacle of quality from the most esteemed vineyards in Sonoma and Napa.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
A vast appellation covering Sonoma County’s Pacific coastline, the Sonoma Coast AVA runs all the way from the Mendocino County border, south to the San Pablo Bay. The region can actually be divided into two sections—the actual coastal vineyards, marked by marine soils, cool temperatures and saline ocean breezes—and the warmer, drier vineyards further inland, which are still heavily influenced by the Pacific but not quite with same intensity.
Contained within the appellation are the much smaller Fort Ross-Seaview and Petaluma Gap AVAs.
The Sonoma Coast is highly regarded for elegant Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and, increasingly, cool-climate Syrah. The wines have high acidity, moderate alcohol, firm tannin, and balanced ripeness.