Winemaker Notes
Pair this wine with slow smoked fatty salmon with reduced raspberry sauce.
Blend: 100% Pinot Noir
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
The brilliantly fresh and deliciously fascinating nose on this bottling pops with raspberry, cherry, sumac, pepper and French toast spice aromas. The palate layers dank herb and sansho pepper flavors into waves of raspberry, strawberry and sour cherry, keeping the mouth watering the entire time.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Fermented with 60% whole clusters and aged in neutral wood, the 2023 Pinot Noir Terraces is very complete, with framboise and redcurrant fruit intermixed with sappy flowers, underbrush, and sandalwood. It's medium-bodied, with a pure, seamless mouthfeel, ripe tannins, and a great finish. It picks up more classic Sta. Rita Hills iodine and marine-like nuances as it sits in the glass, and it's just an incredibly compelling, complete Pinot Noir that will benefit from a year or two and shine over the following decade. Drink 2026-2036.
Rating: 96+ -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
One of the more impressive wines in the range, the 2023 Pinot Noir Terraces hails from a west-facing hillside planted on clay soils that receive the brunt of winds coming off the Pacific. It opens slowly but steadily, its mineral-driven, persistent core hinted at by the intensity and focus of its saline, spicy and herbal bouquet. The palate is dense, concentrated and palpably tense, gradually releasing into a glacially slow, tenacious finish that blooms with the region's signature tea-like aromatics and marine overtones. Despite the taut, youthful buttoned-up nature here, there is a nimbleness and airiness to this wine that is deeply alluring, and it should be a pleasure to watch evolve in the cellar. Rating: 95+
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Wine Spectator
A focused, piercing style that pushes briny minerality to the fore, while a core of succulent, tangy raspberry, damson plum and blood orange coulis follows quickly behind. The long, fine-grained finish lets a smoldering rooibos note linger. Nicely done. Best from 2026 through 2036. 576 cases made.
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Vinous
The 2023 Pinot Noir Estate Terraces comes from a hillside block that faces west, which means it gets pounded by the wind and the grapes generate very thick skins. That yielded a muscular, chiseled wine with palpable tension and mineral drive, further heightened by this cool, late-ripening year. There's a sense of classicism here, and also a hair of rusticity that shows in the roughness of the contours. The 2023 is a powerhouse that needs at least a few years to shed some tannic heft.
Rating: 93+
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.