Winemaker Notes
Blend: 100% Pinot Noir
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
‘Lutum’ is Latin for ‘soil’, indicating the vision of owner Bill Price and winemaker Gavin Chanin to create wines that express great sites. This Pinot is from a renowned vineyard: pure and focused flavours over a core of dark berry fruit.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The most pure, focused and crystalline of the Santa Barbara releases, the 2013 Pinot Noir Sanford & Benedict Vineyard offers stunning aromas and flavors of rose petals, spring flowers and violets to go with a core of darker berry fruit. Picking up additional minerality with time in the glass, it's medium-bodied, ultra-pure and focused, yet still has beautiful fruit and a seamless texture that keeps it fun to drink. It's a great Pinot Noir. Completely destemmed and aged 18 months in 25% new French oak, it's another effort from this team that will have over a decade of longevity.
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.