Winemaker Notes
#2 James Suckling Top 100 Wines of the World 2025
#1 James Suckling Top 100 Wines of the USA 2025
The 2023 vintage leads with captivating aromas of crushed wild berries, black cherries, rose petals, and coastal moss. Continued floral notes, black tea, and bergamot follow, giving way to coastal fern and forest floor. The powerful red and black fruit core is delicately interlaced with the notes of flowers and tea and coupled with exotic spice box, are all seamlessly woven together in a persistently long and everlasting finish.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
An amazingly complex, dynamic wine that demands your attention from the first sniff to the lingering finish. Aromas of redwood forest, rosemary, purple flowers and black cherries, then black tea, pomegranate, dark cherry, dried raspberry and wild mushroom flavors. Fine-grained moderate tannins and crunchy acidity give it such a firm backbone. Drink now or hold.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The ruby-hued 2023 Royal St. Robert is a selection from their coastal vineyards and is named to honor their grandfather. It opens to notes of wild raspberries, brushy windswept herbs, rose petals, dark stones, and elegant spices. Medium-bodied, it has a good deal of depth on the palate. Drink over the coming 15 years. It has 100% whole clusters in this vintage.
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Wine Spectator
This is stylish, with a gently singed sandalwood frame around a core of light damson plum and bitter cherry fruit mixed with rose hip, savory and cherry pit hints. The finish is taut, with a lightly stemmy nuance to it, giving this lingering tension.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2023 Pinot Noir Royal St. Robert bursts from the glass with pure scents of cranberry, blood orange, Angostura bitters and cola, and as it spends time in the glass, it begins to reveal compelling foresty undertones. The medium-bodied palate is silky and bright with concentrated, crunchy flavors, vibrant acidity and a long, perfumed finish.
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Vinous
The 2023 Pinot Noir Royal St. Robert is redolent of floral, savory and citrus notes. I find it especially brilliant and crystalline. At the same time, the 2023 is pretty tightly wound. Rose petal, iron, tea leaves, incense and dried herbs open nicely with some coaxing, The colder growing season brings out the slightly gamier, wilder side of Pinot Noir along with plenty of brightening acidity in this mid-weight, taut Pinot from Raen.
As winemakers and farmers, Carlo and Dante attribute a great deal of what they have learned to their grandfather Robert and father Tim, both whom influenced them from a young age.
Carlo and Dante’s father Tim was a pioneer for California Pinot Noir in the early 1970s and has always had a tremendous regard for the great wines of Burgundy. To this day his Pinot Noirs from the 1970s are showing incredibly well. Carlo and Dante credit their father’s passion for Pinot Noir as the early inspiration that got them excited at a young age.
Dante studied abroad in Switzerland at the Webster University in Genève as well at UC Davis in California. Carlo studied in France at the University of Aix-en-Provence and in Italy at the University of Milan. After their formal studies were complete Carlo and Dante continued their educational work with the winemaking team lead by their father Tim Mondavi at Robert Mondavi Winery and Opus One.
When Robert Mondavi Winery was sold in 2004, the brothers joined their father Tim, Aunt-Marcia and grandfather Robert as they founded Continuum in 2005.
In 2013 Carlo and Dante founded RAEN winery with the goal to produce world class Pinot Noir on the western hills of the Sonoma Coast. RAEN currently focuses on making three Pinot Noirs, from three unique sites on the Sonoma Coast.
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.