Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This bottling is often Talley’s best Pinot each vintage, and so it is in 2011. It’s full bodied in style with a dark color hinting at the superripe cherries, raspberries and cola flavors. Yet it never loses Pinot’s essential silkiness. Structured and nuanced, it’s a natural cellar candidate to drink from 2017–2021.
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Wine Spectator
Intense and vibrant with a complex array of subtle earth, dried dark berry, sour cherry and exotic spice notes. Tight now, this gains with air and should only get better. Best from 2014 through 2023.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale to medium ruby, the 2011 Pinot Noir Rosemary's Vineyard offers a note of caramel and toasted coconut to begin, giving way to mushroom tart, dried red and black cherries, raspberries, loamy earth and sweet spices accents. The medium-bodied, silky palate is still dense with fruit, firmly framed and fresh, finishing long.
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.”
One of the coolest growing areas in California, the Arroyo Grande Valley runs from the southwest to the northeast, just a few miles from the Pacific Ocean and is part of the Central Coast AVA. Situated so that cold Pacific Ocean air and fog is allowed to filter into the valley, Arroyo Grande also has an incredibly long growing season. Bud break occurs in February in most years with flowering in May and harvest in late September; the area is classified as cool Mediterranean.
These weather factors combined with the soil types—continental and marine rocks, greywacke, limestone, shale and volcanic—create wines with great concentration and fresh acidity. The cooler end of the valley is perfect for Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and is a good producer of sparkling wines. The warmer, more inland part of the valley is home to some of California’s oldest Zinfandel vines.