Winemaker Notes
The Sonatera Vineyard Pinot Noir offers primarily red fruits with great intensity. Underneath this fruit emerges the dried herb and pine characteristics, resulting in a wine with savory, earth notes with rich fruit.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
A funk of truffle and foresty pine resin is joined by orange peel for an inviting and intriguing opening to this wine that is otherwise velvety, structured and intense. Juicy on the finish, it shares flavors of black cherry and black tea. Cellar Selection.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
From another Sonoma Coast vineyard, the 2013 Pinot Noir Sonatera Vineyard is outstanding. This wine, coming from four separate clones, offers blacker fruits, more forest floor and complex Côte de Nuits- like characteristics, in a slightly bigger framework than the three predecessors, along with plenty of depth and silky, soft tannins. Drink it over the next 5-6 years.
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.