The Sonoma Coast Appellation is a large and, quite frankly, rather poorly defined Appellation. As it stands now, vineyard from Highway 101 near the Marin County border to the ocean ridges north of Jenner near Mendocino County all fall within the Sonoma Coast Appellation. This type of geographical spread can lead to wines of varying character and quality. To our tastes, wines from the Sonoma Coast should show a combination of woodsy, earthy complexity buffered up by strong, underlying fruit flavors. This combination makes the best examples more complex than your stereotypical California Pinot Noir but also more fruit intense than many of the wines from Oregon.
Given that the 2001 Siduri Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir is our first Sonoma Coast Appellation Pinot Noir we were hoping to capture this complexity but not completely confident we could do so in an Appellation wine. Our blending trials encouraged us to proceed and when we tasted the wine out of the tank we said. "this tastes like the Sonoma Coast!" In other words, we couldn't be happier with the results.
The 2001 Siduri Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir comes primarily from the Hirsch Vineyard, overlooking the Pacific Ocean west of Cazadero. As many of you know, we've been purchasing grapes from David Hirsch since 1995. This experience is of enormous benefit to us, but it also comes with very high expectations for the wine. To produce the finest Hirsch Vineyard Pinot Noir in 2001 (offered in the last mailer) we were extremely selective in our barrel selection process. Thus some truly tasty barrels that didn't quite fit into the blend were left out of the single-vineyard wine and made their way into this Appellation blend.
We added some "beef" to this wine by blending in a small amount of wine from the Van der Kamp Vineyard on the Sonoma Mountain. The Van der Kamp fruit was bigger, with more weight and certainly more tannic backbone. The resulting wine is more interesting than either of its separate parts. It invites you in with a wonderful nose of pine needles, earth, and berry fruits. In the mouth the wine alternates between red fruit flavors and the on-going forest floor complexity. The finish shows enough tannins to match wonderfully with food or to let it cellar for a couple of years.
WINE STATISTICS
Harvest Dates: September 5,13,14,21, October 1,
Blend: 88% Hirsch, 12% Van der Kamp
Clones: Pommard, Mt. Eden, Martini, 777
Case Production: 338 case
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