Over the past few vintages, we've been working with the Pisonis to increase the quality of the grapes at the vineyard, which of course can only make better wine. While we've always received great critical acclaim for our Pisoni Pinots, we believe that we can do even better with this wine. Specifically, we've been working with Mark Pisoni closely and doing a couple of things differently:
1) We've been pruning later. In 2008, we pruned the Big Block section of the Pisoni Vineyard six weeks later than the rest of the vineyard. In 2009, we pruned it 8 weeks later. The goal is to delay ripening by pruning later and thus avoiding being near ripeness when the inevitable late-August/early-September heat spike occurs and this allows us to get a longer hang time.
2) We've also been doing some crop load experiments over the past few years....dropping crop by various means (removing shoots rather than clusters, removing clusters earlier, removing clusters later) and seeing how the resulting wine trials turned out.
Well, in 2008 one lot of Pisoni Big Block tasted extremely special very early in the winemaking process (as juice, quite frankly). This lot....pruned later, with crop dropped later in the ripening process....simply tasted special....in a “damn, this is really good” sort of way. We kept this lot separate throughout fermentation and pressed it, by itself, to four new French oak barrels. The wine, throughout all of its phases, always tasted fantastic. In the past, wines as special as this one have wound up being named and bottled for our children in their birth years. Since we are done having babies, we decided that
this wine needed to be set aside as our first ever “Reserve” bottling of Pisoni Pinot Noir.
Then, in December of 2008, we received some very sad news.....that Eddie Pisoni....husband of Jane Pisoni, father of Gary Pisoni, and grandfather of Mark & Jeff Pisoni....had passed away. Eddie purchased the land that is the Pisoni Vineyard in 1979. It was Gary's vision to plant the land to grapes....but Eddie and Jane were the first ones to see the land and realize the true potential of this special place. Eddie was always very kind to us....always asking about our opinion of the grapes, about
wine sales, about our family. He was simply a great guy and a good friend.
It took us awhile, however, to put 2 and 2 together and realize that this special lot of Pisoni Pinot Noir was, in some unplanned way, a tribute to Eddie. We kept tasting the wine during its maturation and each time we did so, it became more and more clear to us that this wine should be something we bottled separately in Eddie's honor. We came up with a special label for the wine and then bottled it, without fining or filtration, as naturally as possible.
Thus the 2008 Siduri Eddie's Lot Pisoni Vineyard Pinot Noir was born. We just bottled this wine, all 92 cases of it, and it is everything from bottle that it was from barrel and then some. Big, rich, commanding attention, full of flavor and personal-ity, with a long, lingering finish and very good levels of natural acidity. It is often said but less often true....this wine tastes good right away but we have no doubt that it will reward aging.
92-94 points Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate
Cases: 92
Released: October 2009
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