Winemaker Notes
The West Ridge Pinot Noir also includes the very best barrels from Blocks 6 and 12, planted to the heritage California Pinot Noir clones of Swan and Pommard-Wädenswil. The West Ridge is the most delicate and transparent of their wines, seducing with complexity and mystery, rather than with power.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Extremely beautiful aromas of strawberry, ginger, smoke and dried meat. Full-bodied with chewy tannins that are very well integrated and intense, yet there’s a linear feel through the wine that gives it tension and brightness. Better after 2022.
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Decanter
The most elegant, ethereal and delicate wine of the Hirsch Pinot catalogue: this vintage exhibits blue flowers, fresh herbs and pomegranate on the nose. The palate is lacy, weightless and harmonious, while the finish shows drying, super-fine tannins of grace and length. The fruit is from 30-year-old vines planted on dense clay soils, with direct exposure to the Pacific Ocean.
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Jeb Dunnuck
One of the more lightly colored Pinot Noirs in the lineup, the 2018 Pinot Noir West Ridge has a translucent ruby color to go with a more subtle nose of ripe mulled cherries, dried flowers, savory herbs, and a touch of marine-like minerality and iodine. More round, supple, and elegant on the palate, it still brings plenty of ripe tannins, terrific overall balance, and just a charming, interesting, satisfying style. My money is on it benefiting from another year or two of bottle age and keeping for a solid decade.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Pinot Noir West Ridge opens with touches of leather and angostura bitters over a core of bright red berry fruit and citrus peel. The light-bodied palate offers firm, fresh, crunchy fruits with loads of spicy accents, and it finishes long.
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Wine & Spirits
This comes from a collection of parcels on the ocean-side of Hirsch’s far-coast estate, on ridgetops once cov-ered in redwoods, timbered more than a cen-tury ago to rebuild San Francisco after the city burned. The wine carries a memory of those coastal redwoods in its foresty red-berry flavor, along with a gentle rain of tannins, persistent in their mineral spice.
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Wine Spectator
Vibrantly fruity and minerally, with cherry, currant and berry flavors that are sculpted and precise. The juicy finish hums with cedar and underbrush accents. Drink now through 2025.
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.”
On the far western edge of the larger Sonoma Coast appellation, the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA hugs right up against the Pacific coast. Vineyards, planted at rugged elevations between 920 to 1,800 feet, occupy only two percent of the total land in the AVA. Fort Ross-Seaview growers believe that the region boasts an ideal mix of sunshine, cool air and beneficial stress for producing high quality Chardonnay and Pinot noir.