Winemaker Notes
This wine is ideally served with oily fishes such as salmon or bluefish, goat cheese, cured ham, light red meats, pastas and spicy foods.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2010 Pinot Noir Corralillo was aged for 11 months in French oak. Dark ruby in color, it offers up a pleasing perfume of cedar, black cherry, black raspberry, and Asian spices. This leads to a plump Pinot with savory flavors, soft tannins, and lively acidity to balance the fruit. This elegantly styled wine will deliver enjoyment over the next 4-5 years.
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.”
Its rolling, coastal hills encouraged great investment in the 1990s from those in search of a cooler grape growing environment compared to those found in Chile’s Central Valley. All of the vineyards of the San Antonio Valley, which runs north to south and parallel to the coast, experience the cooling effect of the ocean and are made of vine-loving clay and granitic soils. While Sauvignon Blanc put this valley on the Chilean wine map, high quality Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are emerging and some producers are starting to experiment with sparkling wine.