Winemaker Notes
Try pairing this Pinot Noir with grilled chicken and vegetable kabobs fresh off the grill.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Edna Valley release, the 2014 Pinot Noir Stone Corral is another polished, complex and seamless effort from winemaker Eric Johnson that offers classic notes of spice, forest floor, dried flowers and sweet red fruits. Aged 16 months in 27% new French oak, it's impeccably balanced, has a charming, forward character and will drink nicely for 5-6 years.
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Wine Enthusiast
From a vineyard owned by Talley but shared in equal parts with two other wineries, this bottling is snappy on the nose with black raspberry, graphite, sweet juniper and rose hip aromas. On the palate, it's light in body and lively with acidic energy, offering raspberry, tart plum skin and sour cherry, inflected with anise spice. There is significant length to the mouthwatering finish.
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Wine & Spirits
Brian Talley planted Stone Corral in 2001. Its 28 acres of pinot noir are rooted in Arnold loamy sand, and that well-drained soil grew a 2014 that feels delicious and uncomplicated, fresh and soft and velvety, with a violet-scented lift. Those spicy floral notes last through the deep richness of the fruit, re-emerging in the finish with a cooling lift, hinting at the ocean breezes that cool Edna Valley.
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.