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)
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.