Winemaker Notes
Blend: This wine is ideally served with fatty or oily fishes such as salmon or bluefish, goat cheese, cured ham, light red meats, pastas and spicy foods.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Very bright and flamboyant aromas of crushed raspberry and blueberry. Hints of spice. Medium to full body, fine tannins and a fruity, savory character. Whole berry and 25% stems in fermentation and maceration. Fruit-forward in a subtle way. Made from biodynamic grapes.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
We also tasted the 2014 Pinot Noir EQ from a riper vintage, but with lower yields because of the frost. It fermented in open vats with indigenous yeasts. Depending on the conditions to the year, there are 15% to 20% full clusters. This 2014 is a lot darker than the 2013, and it also feels riper and rounder, with a richer texture but keeping the austere profile of sour cherries, as well as the freshness and minerality provided by the granite. In 2015, they will do a single vineyard Pinot Noir from the higher altitude plot with very sandy, granite soils that provide very deep wines. I look forward to tasting this new small lot.
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Wine Spectator
Dense and rich, with meaty notes to the dark plum, dried cherry and rooibos tea flavors. Crisp midpalate, with some flinty accents. The finish lingers with cardamom and allspice hints. Drink now through 2019.
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.