Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale onion skin in color, the 2016 Rosé Heintz Vineyard opens with touches of flint and toast and is beginning to show some tertiary notes of mushroom powder and iodine. Its aromatic reticence gives way to a surprisingly powerful palate that explodes with generous flavors! Medium-bodied, luxuriously creamy and dry, it offers powerful, ripe fruit and alluring savory accents. It's carried along by energetic acidity and has a long finish packed with layers of flinty fruit. It's a wonderfully complex sparkling with the potential to develop gracefully in bottle over the next decade.
Representing the topmost expression of a Champagne house, a vintage Champagne is one made from the produce of a single, superior harvest year. Vintage Champagnes account for a mere 5% of total Champagne production and are produced about three times in a decade. Champagne is typically made as a blend of multiple years in order to preserve the house style; these will have non-vintage, or simply, NV on the label. The term, "vintage," as it applies to all wine, simply means a single harvest year.
Home to a diverse array of smaller AVAs with varied microclimates and soil types, Sonoma County has something for every wine lover. Physically twice as large as Napa Valley, the region only produces about half the amount of wine but boasts both tremendous quality and variety. With its laid-back atmosphere and down-to-earth attitude, the wineries of Sonoma are appreciated by wine tourists for their friendliness and approachability. The entire county intends to become a 100% sustainable winegrowing region by 2019.
Sonoma County wines are produced with carefully selected grape varieties to reflect the best attributes of their sites—Dry Creek Valley’s consistent sunshine is ideal for Zinfandel, while the warm Alexander Valley is responsible for rich, voluptuous red wines like Cabernet Sauvignon. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are important throughout the county, most notably in the cooler AVAs of Russian River, Sonoma Coast and Carneros. Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot and Syrah have also found a firm footing here.