Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
All destemmed and brought up 83% new French oak, the tiny production 2018 Pinot Noir The Traveler is a gem of a wine that ranks with the top tier releases in the vintage. Made by Todd Kohn and all from the estate Wayfarer Vineyard, it offers a beautiful bouquet of ripe strawberries, framboise, white flowers, toasted spice, and pine/forest floor-like nuances. These all carry to a medium to full-bodied Pinot Noir with stunning tannins, a seamless texture, and flawless balance. It has a big core of sweet fruit (I'd guess Russian River blind) yet is just pure class, with nothing out of place and a great, great finish. It needs an hour in a decanter if drinking any time soon, and it's going to evolve for a solid decade.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Pinot Noir The Traveler has a medium ruby color and slowly emerging scents of mushrooms, laurel, wet leaves, stewed tea, dried orange and cranberries. The medium-bodied palate is silky, soft and plush, packed with fruits, earth, spices and floral perfume, and it finishes very 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.”
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.