Winemaker Notes
With a shimmering, dark garnet hue, the 2021 ‘Ma Danseuse’ showcases a gorgeous display of rose petals, black cherry, strawberries, and black raspberries with subtle hints of clove, graphite, and vanilla. A polished, round entry builds to well-integrated tannins in the late midpalate and a soft finish. The wine is structured with impressive density and flesh with great length.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
A deep and semi-opaque ruby/purple color, the 2021 Pinot Noir Ma Danseuse is ripe with black cherry, violets, and wet stone. This full-bodied Pinot Noir is balanced and broad on the palate, with ripe tannins, and it’s flush with ripe black raspberry, sweet earth, and tea leaf, a velvety texture, and good purity. Drink 2025-2037.
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James Suckling
Ripe strawberry, orange, oyster shell, lavender and umami aromas. Hints of pine undertones, Medium-bodied with a tight tannin profile that gives it length, tension and depth. Needs three or four years to come together.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 Pinot Noir Ma Danseuse has deep, youthfully gregarious scents of black cherry, red berries, blood orange, forest floor and dried lavender with generous spicy undertones. The medium-bodied palate is bursting with juicy fruit, enveloped by velvety tannins, and it finishes very long, layered and spicy. You could enjoy it now for its hedonistic fruit or allow it to reveal more of its foresty, earthy character as it matures over the next 10-15 years.
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Wine Spectator
This gushes with loganberry, mulberry and boysenberry fruit compote flavors, flanked by singed apple wood and anise along the way. The finish is accented by sweet spices, as the fruit keeps the upper hand. For fans of the showy style.
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.