The Siduri Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir is part of our stable of Appellation wines - blends composed of selected barrels from the single vineyard properties that we often designate as our more expensive vineyard-designated wines. These Appellation Pinot Noirs all represent fantastic values in a somewhat expensive Pinot Noir marketplace. This is especially true in the case of the Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir, where great grapes come at a premium and finding outstanding reasonably priced Pinot Noir is sometimes difficult. We hope that our Santa Rita Pinot Noir fills this gap.

The 2009 Siduri Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir, the wine is a blend of 56% Clos Pepe Vineyard Pinot Noir and 44% Cargasacchi Vineyard Pinot Noir. These two vineyards are highly respected sources of superb Pinot Noir grapes, grown by individuals who are dedicated to doing everything necessary to provide us with outstanding fruit. We harvested the Clos Pepe Vineyard beginning September 18 and ending on October 9. We picked Cargasacchi at the end of that period, also on October 9. After fermentation and aging in oak for almost 6 months, we tasted all of the barrels from these two vineyards blind, and selected certain ones to go into the singlevineyard wines and others to be blended together into this Appellation wine. Once we created this blend we made an unusual decision, especially for an Appellation blend, by choosing to keep this wine in barrel past the 2010 harvest, not bottling it until January of 2011. We made this decision because the wine simply possessed the stuffing to benefit from addition time in oak.

The 2009 Siduri Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir is a particularly impressive Appellation wine. Possessing darker, rich fruits and some dried herb and mineral complexity, this wine impresses right off the bat. It is quite giving in the mid-palate, but on the finish the textbook tannins of the Santa Rita Hills comes thru, tightening the wine up and providing some needed structure. This is an Appellation Pinot Noir that certainly demands respect as a wine of great character and even age ability.

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