Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
This world-class expression offers up a savory nose of shiitake mushroom, red licorice, and ripe strawberry. Full-bodied, with riveting acidity, it feels weighty with complexity. Blackstrap molasses is accented by cherry and sweet tobacco.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The single vineyard 2017 Pinot Noir Sun Chase (11 months in 40% new French oak) turns the purity and richness dial up a touch, offering beautiful black raspberry fruit, some smoked herbs, violets, and forest floor notes, medium body, beautiful elegance, and a great finish. It's an incredibly impressive, balanced Pinot Noir that I suspect will keep for a decade.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Pinot Noir Sun Chase Vineyard is pale to medium ruby-purple with a very pretty nose of dried violets, cola, warm red cherries and blueberries with dusty earth and spice nuances. Medium-bodied, it's concentrated in the mouth with earthy/spicy accents, soft, grainy tannins and a long, layered finish.
Rating: 93+ -
Wine Spectator
Well-sculpted and refined dark berry and red fruit flavors are matched to crunchy acidity. Supple midpalate, featuring a finish that lingers with cocoa powder and Asian spice notes. Drink now through 2024
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Wine Enthusiast
This is a bold, full-bodied and ripely styled red from the producer's own impressive vineyard site, high in the wilds of the new appellation. Smoky oak, wood and dark, concentrated cherry fruit combine around a core of substantial tannin and texture.
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.