Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The deeper colored 2016 Pinot Noir Home Vineyard is more fresh and focused, with a liquid rock-like minerality as well as lots of purple fruits, violets, and forest floor. Fermented with 100% whole clusters, this medium-bodied, elegant, yet tight, backward effort needs a solid 2-4 years of bottle age, and I suspect will have 10-15 years of prime drinking.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2016 Pinot Noir Home Vineyard reveals a deep-pitched bouquet of plummy fruit, raw cocoa, potpourri, cinnamon and nutmeg. On the palate, it's medium to full-bodied, tense and chalky, with a fine-grained but tight-knit chassis of tannins and a long, sappy finish. Vinified with 100% whole cluster, this is taut and structural right now, so plan on cellaring it for 5-6 years, perhaps longer, and following it for the subsequent 10-15 years.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
A large Northern California appellation centered on the San Francisco Bay Area, the San Francisco Bay AVA falls within the larger Central Coast AVA. The smaller appellations of Livermore Valley, Pacheco Pass, San Ysidro District and Santa Clara Valley AVAs fall within the San Francisco Bay boundaries, and all produce high-quality Central Coast wines.