With some of our Appellation Pinot Noir blends, our job is to take their natural concentration and work to make the wine more complex (the Santa Lucia Highlands and Sta. Rita Hills are two such examples). With this wine, the Sonoma Coast, the wine already possesses great complexity and our job is to make sure it is adequately concentrated. Fortunately, the incredible 2009 vintage provided the raw materials necessary to make this happen, without a lot of extra effort.

As is often the case, the Sonatera Vineyard makes up the majority of this wine. From the Sonatera Vineyard we take four different clones of Pinot Noir, harvested almost a month apart, and blend them together to provide the heart of this wine. In 2009, we filled in this wine with fruit from the Hirsch Vineyard, the Riddle Ranch (a small vineyard just west of Occidental) and a vineyard west of Forestville. The Hirsch certainly provided additional levels of complexity, while the Riddle Ranch and Forestville sites were more about concentration. Blending them together produced a wine that is certainly one of our favorite 2009 Appellation bottlings.

Upon opening, the 2009 Siduri Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir shows the forest floor, pine needle character that we find so often in Sonoma Coast wines. Red fruits come to the forefront on the pallate, with hints of earth and minerals. The mid-palate shows more concentration and weight, and the finish is long, with good acidity. This wine certainly drinks well now but

Cases: 1028
Released: April 2011