Winemaker Notes
This Pinot explodes out of the glass with notes of boysenberry and cream, intermingled with forest floor and metallic notes. It has power to spare, but a pure core of dark berry fruit that will benefit from age. It is distinctly more upfront than its Withers brethren. This wine is named for Claire Tow, deceased mother of Founder Andrew Tow.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
Tense and dynamic, this wine has the fresh coastal air of a conifer forest in the uplands of the Mendocino coast. There’s a brisk, glimmering intensity to the red fruit that places it on top of a coastal ridge, a brilliant length of flavor combining fresh notes of forest mushrooms, stemmy scents of spice in the tannins and floral red fruit—a combination that inhabits your breath after you take a sip, and lasts in transparent shades of the original taste. This wine grows at the Peterson family’s vineyard in Comptche, grapes offered to Andrew Tow only for this year. He and his winemaker, David Low, cold soaked those grapes for a week, with 35 percent whole bunches; after a slow fermentation, they aged the wine in mostly old barrels, undisturbed for a year. Tow plans to use the Claire’s Vineyard label, named after his mother, for exceptional one-offs like this pinot noir.
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.”
A large and diverse appellation within California’s North Coast AVA, Mendocino is home to several smaller sub-regions—most notably the Anderson Valley. This scenic region, with rolling hills covered in redwood forests as well as vineyards, is one of the world’s top producers of certified organically-grown grapes. Due to wide geographical and climatic variation, a vast array of wine styles can be found here.