Winemaker Notes
This Pinot Noir has lovely expressive aromas with tea, autumn leaves and tart cherries layered with spice and well integrated toasty oak.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2016 Pinot Noir comes from the estate Sawyer Lindquist Vineyard in the Edna Valley. It has a great bouquet of ripe red and black fruits, ground pepper, forest floor, and crushed rock-like minerality. Nicely textured and balanced, with good acidity, it's a classic Pinot Noir to enjoy over the coming 7-8 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.”
California’s coolest wine growing area, Edna Valley excels in the production of high quality Central Coast wines like Pinot noir, Chardonnay, Rhône Blends and aromatic white wines. It has a cool Mediterranean climate and an incredibly long growing season, giving late-ripening varieties plenty of opportunity to develop great phenolic complexity.
Its northwest to southeast orientation creates a direct path for cool Pacific air and fog to penetrate the valley from the Los Osos and Morro Bay area inwards. Low hillsides of both calcareous and volcanic soils are home to much of the vineyard acreage of the Edna Valley.