Winemaker Notes
The wine shows sultry aromas of lavender and crushed rose petals. Flavors are filled with strawberry, raspberry and candied orange. The mouthfeel is generous and the finish is full and balanced with bright, seamless acidity.
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
Lilacs, plum, and wet earth are just the first aromatics to grace the nose of this luxe red, whose palate is equally perfumed and charged with flavor, from molasses and wild cherry to savory mushroom. The texture is fleshy, and the finish sparks with black pepper, cedar, and sassafras.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2017 Pinot Noir Sonoma County should represent a terrific value (I wasn’t able to get a price for this release) and it has a classic, balanced style as well as complex notes of black raspberries, spice, and smoky earth. As with everything from this estate, it’s beautifully balanced, with undeniable elegance and a great finish. I suspect it will keep for a decade.
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Wine Enthusiast
This is a bold, hugely concentrated wine, jammy in up-front notions of black cherry and baked strawberry. With firm silky tannins that add weight and structure, it shows its oak, letting it settle to reveal appealing accents of dried herb and Asian spice.
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.”
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.