Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Expressive in oak, earth and clove with cinnamon-cola, this savory, complex wine is also impressive in its ability to offer crisp and focused lines of citrus and fresh-picked raspberry. It teeter-totters the variety's ability to be both fruit-forward and elusively hard to reach. Streaks of thyme and rosemary figure into the mix. Drink now through 2023. Cellar Selection.
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Connoisseurs' Guide
Impressing right from the first with its fine sense of both polish and youthful vigor, the Rochioli Riverblock bottling is a complete and wonderfully precise Pinot that gains in richness as it sits in the glass. It marries very deep and incisive, ripe cherry fruit with a brightening bit of cranberry-like freshness and is filled out with complexing suggestions of crème brûlée and toasted vanilla. It is extraordinarily long on the palate with great fruity stamina, and, as good as it is now, it is wine that is very much worthy of hiding away in the cellar for a half-dozen or more years.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2013 Pinot Noir Rochioli Riverblock Vineyard has a very dense ruby/purple color and a beautiful nose of gun flint, raspberries, black cherries and blackcurrants. The wine displays full-body, super-duper richness and ripeness, beautiful minerality, and a long, long finish. This is a superb Pinot Noir and one of the best I tasted from this vintage in the Russian River. Drink it over the next 10+ years.
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.