Winemaker Notes
Blend: 100% Pinot Noir
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Bountiful black-cherry flavors and good balance make this full-bodied wine difficult to resist. Black-fruit flavors are rich and well concentrated, backed by a light touch on the oak spices that emerge on the finish and add nice complexity.
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Wine & Spirits
This carries the forest green scent of the far-coast hills, a savory pinot noir with mineral intensity. The wine’s cherry-red fruit ripens on the eastern, leeward slopes of the second ridge in from the Pacific, that ripeness tamed by an earthy evergreen scent lasts for minutes, as if breathing the air at the edge of a redwood grove.
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Connoisseurs' Guide
Davies has come up with a most attractive slate of Pinot Noirs in 2020 that reminds that a good many successful wines can be had from a vintage on the North Coast that had more than its fair share of challenges. A perennial high performer from the Nobles Vineyard in the cool Sonoma Coast, this edition is a deep and incisively varietal working that captures explicit, very pure, cherry and plum fruit sweetened by a judicious touch of oak. A concise and graceful Pinot rather than one that goes for density and heft, it is impeccably balanced and continuously focused with terrific fruity stamina.
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Wine Spectator
Enticing, with gently mulled raspberry and red cherry notes mixed with touches of forest floor, licorice root and incense. Polished finish. Drink now through 2025.
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.”
On the far western edge of the larger Sonoma Coast appellation, the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA hugs right up against the Pacific coast. Vineyards, planted at rugged elevations between 920 to 1,800 feet, occupy only two percent of the total land in the AVA. Fort Ross-Seaview growers believe that the region boasts an ideal mix of sunshine, cool air and beneficial stress for producing high quality Chardonnay and Pinot noir.