Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
In recent years, Precious Mountain Vineyard has provided Bob Cabral with some of his most glorious fruit. Tremendous in flash and depth, it offers compelling flavors of raspberry and cherry, accented by sweet, smoky oak. There’s such complexity in the acid and tannin structure, and in the earthy, stony, spicy nuances, that you find something new to love with every sip. This masterpiece is fabulous now, and will develop bottle complexity over the next 15 years, at least.Cellar Selection.
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Wine & Spirits
Precious Mountain is an early planting in the Fort Ross–Seaview zone of the far coast, on ridges above the fog at 1,400 feet. The Schatzberg’s five acres of pinot noir, dry-farmed and organically grown, consistently produce one of Williams Selyem’s most complex and distinctive wines. In 2010, it’s classical, with just a few rough edges of the vintage: vibrant coastal spice, dark fruit shot through with light, the sweet graham notes of oak, the tart cut of citrus-like acidity. There’s no heat, and there’s a purity of flavor that bodes well for several years of development in the cellar.
The Sonoma Coast AVA is large in area but, not counting overlapping regions like Russian River Valley, only has a few thousand acres of grapevines—and it’s no wonder. Much of the region is rugged and not easily accessible. Its proximity to the Pacific Ocean’s fog and cool breezes limits the varieties that can be cultivated, but it proves to be an ideal environment for high quality Pinot Noir.
Since fog is a frequent fact of life here, as are heavy marine layers that sometimes bring rain, the best vineyards are wisely planted above the fog line, on picturesque ridges that capture enough sun to provide even ripening. That, with the overnight drop in temperature that reliably preserves acidity, results in fine expressions of Pinot Noir that often receive tremendous critic and consumer praise alike, and are often in high demand.