Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
I loved the 2018 Pinot Noir Ashley's, which offers a pure, elegant, complex style that carries lots of red fruits, spicy incense, flowers, and a touch of briny, marine-like influence. Medium-bodied, nicely textured, and elegant, it has good acidity and fine tannins.
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Wine Enthusiast
Roasted black-plum, vanilla-touched oak and smoke aromas make for a hearty nose on this bottling. Smoked cherry and berry flavors meet with savory pork roast on the sip, where the oak is strong but judiciously employed.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2018 Fess Parker Ashley's Pinot Noir offers excellent complexities and depth of fruit. TASTING NOTES: This wine exhibits attractive aromas and flavors of savory spices, dried leaves, earth, dried fruit, and wood. Enjoy it with grilled, mint leaves-accented lamb chops. (Tasted: April 14, 2021, San Francisco, CA)
Established in 1989, Fess Parker Winery is a multi-generational family owned and operated winery that has a rich heritage in Santa Barbara County. Fess Parker produces premium, small-lot, vineyard designated Burgundian varietals from the Sta. Rita Hills and Santa Maria Valley as well as Rhône varietals from their organically farmed, SIP Certified estate vineyard.
Outstanding fruit sources, including some of the finest vineyards in the county, coupled with skilled winemaking, led by Blair Fox, form the foundation for the winery’s success. Now three generations in, the Fess Parker Family is proud to carry on Fess’s legacy of wine heritage and hospitality in Santa Barbara.
Fess Parker Winery was proud to be named a Top 100 Winery in the World by Wine & Spirits Magazine in both 2022 and 2023.
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 superior source of California Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, Sta. Rita Hills is the coolest, westernmost sub-region of the larger Santa Ynez Valley appellation within Santa Barbara County. This relatively new AVA is unquestionably one to keep an eye on.
The climate of Sta. Rita Hills is a natural match for Chardonnay and Pinot noir, thanks to the crisp ocean breezes and well-drained, limestone-rich calcareous soil. Here, grapes ripen just enough, while retaining brisk acidity and harmonious balance.