Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
My favorite in the lineup was the 2016 Pinot Noir The Traveler, but these are all pretty much desert island wines. Coming from a suitcase clone rumored to be from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and planted in 2001, it was completely destemmed and spent 15 months in 83% new French oak, which is the most new oak of any of the Pinot Noirs. Sensational notes of passion fruits, blood orange, black raspberries, spice, and crazy floral notes give way to medium to full-bodied Pinot Noir that’s just about as good as it gets. With perfect tannins, a seamless, weightless texture, no hard edges, and a blockbuster finish, this finesse-driven, elegant Pinot Noir needs to be tasted to be believed. Hats off to Bibiana Gonzalez Rave.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
From blocks 9 and 18 planted to the proprietary suitcase clone, the 2016 Pinot Noir The Traveler is pale to medium ruby-purple colored and offers a quiet intensity of a myriad of red fruit and floral notes: cranberries, Bing cherries and raspberry leaves with hints of roses, lilacs, mandarin peel, allspice and fragrant underbrush. Medium-bodied, very fine, wonderfully refreshing and bursting with red berry and floral layers, it finishes very long and very minerally.
Rating: 97+
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.”
On the far western edge of the larger Sonoma Coast appellation, the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA hugs right up against the Pacific coast. Vineyards, planted at rugged elevations between 920 to 1,800 feet, occupy only two percent of the total land in the AVA. Fort Ross-Seaview growers believe that the region boasts an ideal mix of sunshine, cool air and beneficial stress for producing high quality Chardonnay and Pinot noir.