Winemaker Notes
This is an approachable vintage of the widely adored offering from just two and a half acres in Coombsville. It is graced with beautifully round blue fruit notes around which dance brighter notes of huckleberry and pomegranate. The finish is dominated with fine, chalky palate coating tannins and minerality that balance the hedonism of the Mink fruit. While this wine is soft and welcoming now, it will in time reveal its underlying depth. Displaying the uniqueness of Coombsville, this luxuriously textural wine will excite the senses with its many complexities.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine is heady in spicy nutmeg on the nose. The palate brings bold flavors of black cherry, strawberry and orange peel. Delicately built and nuanced, it shows a wealth of integrated, supple tannins that lend support
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium ruby-purple colored, the 2016 Pinot Noir Mink Vineyard gives up fragrant kirsch, pomegranate, lavender and rose hip tea scents with touches of wild thyme and forest floor. The palate is medium-bodied, delicately played, fresh, vivacious and softly textured, finishing long and perfumed.
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Jeb Dunnuck
From a site in Coombsville, the 2016 Pinot Noir Mink Vineyard offers up a medium ruby color as well as attractive notes of black raspberries, spice, forest floor, and earth. This elegant, medium-bodied effort has solid density of fruit, bright acidity, and a balanced, thoroughly enjoyable style that should keep nicely for 4-6 years.
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.”
Situated in the southeastern corner of Napa Valley in the Vaca range, the vineyards of the Coombsville AVA enjoy a long growing season mitigated by cool, San Pablo Bay fog.