Winemaker Notes
Peters Vineyard once again offers incredible immediacy with aromas and flavors of raspberry, cherry and perfumed carnation. This is gracious Sonoma Coast pinot, inviting and vibrant with balancing tension. The elegant and well-integrated nature of Peters draws you in, making it hard not to drink right now for all of its fresh beauty.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Pinot Noir Peters Vineyard, pale to medium ruby-purple in the glass, is an incredibly elegant wine. The nose begins with delicate dried roses, orange peel, cinnamon, aniseed, rhubarb and red berry aromas supported by an underlying sense of amaro-like spiciness. The light to medium-bodied palate is delicately styled and gently perfumed with a silky texture and fresh acidity to lift the ethereal finish.
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Wine & Spirits
For the second vintage in a row, the Anthill team—winemakers Anthony Filiberti, David Low and Webster Marquez—seem to have caught their Peters Vineyard pinot noir at the exact right moment of ripeness. (Usually, it’s their tiny production of syrah from Randy Peters’s vines in the hills west of Sebastopol that stands out for me). This wine comes from a parcel planted in the 1980s, at the base of a hill where the cold air settles, making it the last spot to ripen in the vineyard. Their 2018 comes alive the moment it’s poured into the glass, glowing red in color and flavor, gentle and secure in its transparent elegance. The strawberry and tart cranberry flavors feel cool, and the wine itself is cooling as it lasts with dynamic complexity.
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.