Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2016 Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast offers more minerality and salinity as well as darker fruits, graphite, smoke, and scorched earth characteristics. It’s tighter, more backward, and Burgundian, with terrific concentration and purity as well as balance. Give it a few years.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
This is the first vintage for this new Paul Hobbs Pinot Noir from the Sonoma Coast. The 2016 Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast opens with a medium ruby-purple color and notes of warm cherries, mulberries and wild blueberries with touches of dusty soil, dried herbs and tree moss. The medium to full-bodied palate has a good, solid structure of ripe, grainy tannins and a refreshing line carrying the fruit to a long, perfumed finish. 2,049 cases were made.
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.