Winemaker Notes
Bright and juicy red fruit and a well-defined iron inflected finish. Still showing plenty of youthful structure.
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
From a hillside site, the backwards, structured 2014 Pinot Noir Home Vineyard offers lots of minerality as well as notes of scrub brush, resinous herbs, spring flowers and assorted red and black fruits. It has serious tannin, yet also beautiful mid-palate depth, purity of fruit and length. Forget bottles for 4-5 years and enjoy over the following decade.
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.