Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Connoisseurs' Guide
Long on deep, nicely formed fruit and filled out with deftly placed oak that lends an inviting touch of creamy sweetness without ever once threatening to be a distraction, this wonderfully complete and layered young Pinot Noir shows great richness and range even now. Its dominant themes of fully ripe cherries are joined by hints of raspberries, dried roses and a trim touch of vanilla, and, while fully extracted, the wine is lively, lithe and beautifully balanced with a neat spine of integral tannins pointing the way to a least a half-dozen years of improvement. It is a lovely and remarkably successful effort that is a memorable testament to the fact that truly important wines can be found in even the most challenging vintages.
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Wine Spectator
A touch rustic but not out of line for a young wine, offering dried dark berry fruit and edgy tannins. Fills in with blackberry, boysenberry, mocha and black tea notes, holding focus on the long, full finish. Drink now through 2022.
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Wine Enthusiast
This is a full-bodied Pinot Noir, showing lavish new-oak aromas and rich, ripe fruit flavors. Medium-deep ruby in tone, it has aromas suggesting vanilla, toasted oak and nutmeg, with a hint of rhubarb. Flavors recall cherry and blackberry. Gradually the oak flavors recede and the lively fruit character comes out, lingering on the finish.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
Romantics, writers and poets love the Goldeneye Pinot Noirs, wait, I might just be talking about myself. Well, I am all of the above and I found the 2011 Goldeneye Gowan Creek to be a really pure example of the varietal from the cool Anderson Valley; offers bracing red fruit flavors, wild with fine mineral spin to it; frisky in the finish; an excellent choice with savory spiced leg of lamb.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2011 Pinot Noir Gowan Creek Vineyard comes from a foggy site planted with eight different clones of Pinot Noir. This impressive effort possesses pure black cherry, blackcurrant and plum fruit intermixed with vanillin and forest floor notes. Medium-bodied and complete with a beginning, mid-palate and a long finish.
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.”
Reaching up California's coastline and into its valleys north of San Francisco, the North Coast AVA includes six counties: Marin, Solano, Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake. While Napa and Sonoma enjoy most of the glory, the rest produce no shortage of quality wines in an intriguing and diverse range of styles.
Climbing up the state's rugged coastline, the chilly Marin County, just above the City and most of Sonoma County, as well as Mendocino County on the far north end of the North Coast successfully grow cool-climate varieties like Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and in some spots, Riesling. Inland Lake County, on the other hand, is considerably warmer, and Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel and Sauvignon Blanc produce some impressive wines with affordable price tags.