Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
A complex, showy wine with exciting aromas of baked cherry pie, dark blackberry jam, and cherry cordial. Profuse scents of violet, lavender, and red roses add elegance while lush hints of olive tapenade, cola, black pepper, and rich French oak complete the portrait. With its Russian River Valley acidity, it’s a lovely, food-friendly expression of this famed vineyard that’s deep with abundant minerals and spices and ripe with soft tannins and great depth.
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Wine Enthusiast
Broadly fleshy and expansive on the palate, this is a lovely, powerful wine, spicy in forest pine and clove. Succulent on the midpalate, it offers an array of well-defined citrus and wild strawberry, with a lingering quality to the finish that impresses in rose petal and lavender.
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Wine Spectator
Tightly wound, with a mix of loamy earth and dried berry flavors amid sage and cedar notes. This doesn't move beyond that stage for now but time may help. Best from 2019 through 2025.
While the Russian River Valley is a large appellation with multiple climate zones and soil types, it is best known for cool-climate varieties, with Pinot Noir as the most celebrated. The grapes benefit from a reliable late afternoon flow of Pacific Ocean fog through the Petaluma Gap and along the Russian River Valley that ensures slow and steady ripening and the preservation of grape acidity. Today many of California’s most highly regarded Pinot Noir vineyards are in the Russian River Valley, along with its sub-appellation, Green Valley.
Historically Russian River Valley Pinot Noirs had bright red fruit and delicate earthy, mineral notes. But changes in viticultural and winemaking practices have led to stylistic changes in some of the region’s wines. Adjustments to canopy management, among other techniques, have resulted in riper fruit and bolder wines as well. These show flavors of black cherry, blackberry, cola, spice and darker, loamy earth tones, accenting traditional Pinot Noir notes of strawberry, raspberry and light cherry.