Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
Blue Flowers and heather keep the lightness factor going as you travel deep into this concentrated well of roasted coffeee and mocha cookie charm. The nose is sexy with that mysterious endless depth. It grabs you, and speaks of the richness of the mountain fruit.
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Wine Enthusiast
A rich, complex, ageable Pinot from this increasingly well-regarded vineyard. It’s a big, dark wine, explosive in raspberries, cherries and mocha, but retains a delicacy courtesy of its tannins and acids and some mysterious elegance from the soil. This is easily Guarachi’s best Pinot ever, although it’s also their most expensive.
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 vast appellation covering Sonoma County’s Pacific coastline, the Sonoma Coast AVA runs all the way from the Mendocino County border, south to the San Pablo Bay. The region can actually be divided into two sections—the actual coastal vineyards, marked by marine soils, cool temperatures and saline ocean breezes—and the warmer, drier vineyards further inland, which are still heavily influenced by the Pacific but not quite with same intensity.
Contained within the appellation are the much smaller Fort Ross-Seaview and Petaluma Gap AVAs.
The Sonoma Coast is highly regarded for elegant Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and, increasingly, cool-climate Syrah. The wines have high acidity, moderate alcohol, firm tannin, and balanced ripeness.