Williams Selyem Westside Road Neighbors Pinot Noir 2019
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Robert
Parker -
Wilfred
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Jeb
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Product Details
Your Rating
Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
A gorgeous nose of red fruits and red rose jump from the glass. Orange peel adds a wonderful refreshing lift to the aromatics while a touch of star anise adds depth; the oak is beautifully integrated. Broad at the entry, the wine showcases red fruits and minerals. Texturally, the wine is like velvet and saturates the palate. The tannins are refined, and subtlety drive the palate along.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Bright and compelling, this blend from several sites exhibits tremendously impressive notes of rose petal, forest floor and blood orange. Strawberry, raspberry and cherry flavors layer into the ethereal midpalate, with a length of cardamom on the finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium ruby-purple, the 2019 Pinot Noir Westside Road Neighbors offers plush black fruits laced with youthful, classy new oak that gives way to earth and amaro nuances with time in glass. The medium-bodied palate is polished, finely supported and fresh, and it finishes very long and spice-laced. All elegance and class, I can't wait to taste this with a few years of bottle age.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2019 Williams Selyem Westside Road Neighbors Russian River Valley Pinot Noir rocks on the palate with gentle persuasion. TASTING NOTES: This wine brings excellent aromas and flavors of ripe fruit and enticing oak to the fore. Try it with grilled, rosemary-accented, skewered lamb. (Tasted: January 15, 2021, San Francisco, CA)
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Connoisseurs' Guide
Always displaying an extra bit of richness, the Westside Road Neighbors bottling does so once again and it’s the deepest, most generously filled of the Williams Selyem collection under review this month. Moderately full-bodied with a bit of palatal plushness in play early on, it firms up at just the right time and hangs on and on at the finish. There are very clear suggestions of more complexity to come should one opt to lay it away for another three to five – and we heartily endorse the idea that age will make a good thing even better – but it is not in the least stingy or pulled back in fruit even now and is more than up to holding its own against the likes of a garlic-studded leg of lamb.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Coming from a site in the Russian River, the 2019 Pinot Noir Westside Road Neighbors is more closed aromatically yet certainly has potential in its ripe red and black fruits and spice-driven aromatics. It shows more floral and violet nuances on the palate and is medium-bodied, with a seamless texture and solid length on the finish. Hide bottles for a year or two and it should evolve nicely for 7-8 years. Rating: 92+
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Williams Selyem Winery began as a simple dream of two friends, Ed Selyem and Burt Williams, who pursued weekend winemaking as a hobby in 1979 in a garage in Forestville, California, and made their first commercial vintage in 1981. In less than two decades, Burt and Ed created a cult-status winery of international acclaim. Together they set a new standard for Pinot Noir winemaking in the United States, aligning Sonoma County's Russian River Valley in the firmament of the best winegrowing regions of the world. Today John and Kathe Dyson, who purchased the winery from Burt and Ed in 1998, carry on the passion for Pinot Noir winemaking without compromise. As for the wines... they just keep getting better and better.
While the Russian River Valley is a large appellation with multiple climate zones and soil types, it is best known for cool-climate varieties, with Pinot Noir as the most celebrated. The grapes benefit from a reliable late afternoon flow of Pacific Ocean fog through the Petaluma Gap and along the Russian River Valley that ensures slow and steady ripening and the preservation of grape acidity. Today many of California’s most highly regarded Pinot Noir vineyards are in the Russian River Valley, along with its sub-appellation, Green Valley.
Historically Russian River Valley Pinot Noirs had bright red fruit and delicate earthy, mineral notes. But changes in viticultural and winemaking practices have led to stylistic changes in some of the region’s wines. Adjustments to canopy management, among other techniques, have resulted in riper fruit and bolder wines as well. These show flavors of black cherry, blackberry, cola, spice and darker, loamy earth tones, accenting traditional Pinot Noir notes of strawberry, raspberry and light cherry.