Winemaker Notes
The mouth also has medium intensity and weight with added flavors of rose hips and black tea. The fruit is more akin to dried blood oranges and plums (not prunes, think pluots!) with clean acidity, a focused mid-palate and moderate tannins. As is customary with the Scallop Shelf, the finish is long. This is a complex wine with finesse. It offers immediate pleasure and may also be aged for 10+ years if you desire aged Pinot characteristics. If you allow a long decant, darker flavors of licorice will come to the fore though a 30-minute decant will allow the aromas to coalesce.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
Scallop Shelf takes its name from the fossils found in the soil at this old fruit orchard, a vineyard site four miles from the Pacific. It's a blend of six clones, emphasizing the spicy red fruit character of the Pommard clone, which, when it hits on the far Sonoma Coast, makes some of the region's most distinctive pinot noirs. The wine is transparent in color and in its strawberry-like fruit, bright and intense against the smoky conifer minerality of the soil. There's a weave of energy to it, tart and brash as a young wine, growing more focused and refined with air. Cellar this for five years, then serve with grilled arctic char and hen of the woods mushrooms.
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.