Winemaker Notes
#77 Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2021
Deep purplish ruby with lush berry aromas. Minerality combines nicely with full-bodied fruit flavors plus woody/forest floor spice. Sweet tannins and an intensely long finish make this wine compels, year after year.
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
2014 was a magnificent vintage for Pinot Noir on the Sonoma Coast, and the 2014 Pinot Noir Marcassin Vineyard exhibits notes of brown sugar, sweet blackcurrant and black cherry fruit, forest floor, an ethereal floral nuance, stunning richness, and a multi-layered, skyscraper-like mid-palate and finish. This is supple but profoundly deep, rich and iconic. Drink it over the next 15 or so years.
-
Wine Spectator
Elegant and richly spiced, with fine-grained dried cherry and berry flavors that carry hints of aged beef and hot stone. The minerally finish is long and caressing, with silky tannins and forest floor notes. Drink now through 2028.
The Sonoma Coast AVA is large in area but, not counting overlapping regions like Russian River Valley, only has a few thousand acres of grapevines—and it’s no wonder. Much of the region is rugged and not easily accessible. Its proximity to the Pacific Ocean’s fog and cool breezes limits the varieties that can be cultivated, but it proves to be an ideal environment for high quality Pinot Noir.
Since fog is a frequent fact of life here, as are heavy marine layers that sometimes bring rain, the best vineyards are wisely planted above the fog line, on picturesque ridges that capture enough sun to provide even ripening. That, with the overnight drop in temperature that reliably preserves acidity, results in fine expressions of Pinot Noir that often receive tremendous critic and consumer praise alike, and are often in high demand.