Winemaker Notes
Coming from a handful of sites and brought up in 10% new French oak, the Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast is a beautiful wine from this producer. Spiced black cherries, darker framboise, flowery incense, and baking spice notes all emerge from the glass, and it's medium-bodied, fresh, and lively on the palate, yet with deceptive richness and length.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
From six estate properties, they either farm or own. All free run Pinot Noir, some of it short shoot fruit from their top sites. Great concentration of red and blue fruits, loads of savoury characteristics, garrigue and dried sage leaves. The palate is wonderfully elegant, with a mineral core, red and blue bramble fruits and loads of fresh wintergreen and lavender flavours.
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Jeb Dunnuck
A bright jeweled red color, the 2022 Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast is fresh and gorgeously perfumed with pure red raspberry fruit, strawberries, and a light note of pressed roses. Medium-bodied, fine, and refreshing, it has a lovely, tapered, and very clean finish. Refined elegant all the way through, it can be enjoyed 2024-2034.
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.