Winemaker Notes
The 2016 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir delivers generous plum, blueberry, black cherry, and black raspberry and cranberry with notes of earth and black tea. Elegant, balanced, lush and focused. Mouthful is ample and plush gaining depth with a lingering velvety finish.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
I loved the 2016 Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast and this beauty has a terrific bouquet of wild strawberries, flowers, incense, and spice. It's elegant, medium to full-bodied, has a wonderful, seamless texture, and a great finish. Aged 15 months in 47% new French oak, it’s one classy Pinot Noir to enjoy over the coming decade or so.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale to medium ruby, the 2016 Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast is youthfully subdued on the nose, opening to pomegranate, Bing cherry, warm red berries and pretty dried flowers with dusty earth, autumn leaves and spicy touches. Light to medium-bodied, it features wonderfully ripe, spicy red fruit in the mouth with soft, grainy tannins and lovely sweet spice on the finish.
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James Suckling
Attractive and spicy, ripe red fruit, framed in notes of cedary oak. The palate has a super plush and rich array of ripe cherries with a supple, even-paced and juicy finish. Good concentration. This has potential. Drink or hold.
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Wine Spectator
This keeps opening new flavor doors that are ripe and complex, offering layers of raspberry, anise and blueberry, with zesty acidity that lets the flavors glide to an elegant aftertaste. Drink now through 2025.
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.