Tasting Notes

Release Date: Fall 2004

With an early and bountiful crop, typical of all the 2001 wines, this vintage is a classic Santa Cruz Mountain Pinot Noir.

Emphatic, deep color (darker than usual), with aromas of wild strawberry, bing cherry and earth on the palate, this wine is sappy and vibrant with a lovely inner mouth perfume and Old World spiciness. This is not your California “fruit bomb” but rather a wine of elegance and power, which finishes firmly tannic with lingering red fruits in the background.

Month after month this vintage evolves to greater heights.

Aging potential 2005-2010

Production

906

Tech Notes

Yield: 2.5 tons per acre Harvest: August 19th-September 2nd Numbers @ Harvest: 23.3 Brix, 3.65 pH, 6.8 grams acidity Barrel Regimen: Burgundy 50% new Bottling: September 2003 no fining or filtration;

Reviews

90 points Wine Enthusiast Magazine  - June 2005

Doesn’t win your heart immediately.  It’s in your face in acids and tannins.  But it is very fine Pinot worth cellaring.  It’s rich in spicy, berry flavors, with a silky texture that will only get silkier.  Try after 2008. —S.H.

88 (+?) points Stephen Tanzer’s International Wine Cellar - January/February 2005

Good full, deep red. Spicy aromas of redcurrant, plum, mocha, cola and sassafras. Extremely young and even a bit hard-edged with CO2 Pungent, sappy flavors of crushed berries, plum, mocha, spice and earth showed increasing sweetness with extended aeration. Finishes with a youthful dry edge that calls for at least a few years of cellaring.