Wines Pouring

• 2021 Unum Pinot Noir

  Santa Barbara County/Sta. Rita Hills/Pence Vineyards

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  Sourced from our oldest vines planted in 2006, and encompassing only two acres of Dijonnaise Clone 667 on Riperia Glorie rootstock, the Unum block enjoys a beautiful south sun-facing orientation on rich, dense clay, creating fruit that always over-achieves qualitatively. We attribute the wine’s luxuriousness and roundness to its denser clay soils much like the way marbling in Wagyu increases the meat’s flavor and generosity. The wine weighs more beautifully in the palate and is broader, deeper and longer in its finish relative to our Estate Pinot Noir. This extra architecture increases the concentration, allowing the wine to be enjoyed now with more complex Pinot Noir friendly dishes while also assuring its age-worthiness for more than ten years.

  Suggested Retail Price: $75.00
• 2021 Fugio Pinot Noir

  Santa Barbara County/Sta. Rita Hills/Pence Vineyards

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  The Fugio Pinot Noir comes from a four-acre block of cane-pruned Pommard situated on some of our steepest slopes, and characterized by their dense clay and calcareous soils. It is the perfect Yin-Yang to the Unum, its rounder and more generous Pinot Noir sibling. Fugio is always more brooding, ethereal, gamey, less fruit forward, and needs more time to unveil itself, while the Unum celebrates its exuberance and is more accessible now. Fugio's grape skins tend to thicken and thus express more tannin, primarily due to the significant winds that blow through the block’s east/west oriented rows. Recognizing this quality, we encourage further tannin development by employing whole cluster fermentation. This is possible due to the significant lignification of the stems, which tend to ripen more relative to berry maturity than most of our other pinot blocks.

  Suggested Retail Price: $70.00
• 2021 Heritage Pinot Noir

  Santa Barbara County/Sta. Rita Hills/Pence Vineyards

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  Our newly released HERITAGE Estate Pinot Noir is the result of painstaking farming of one of our first Heritage clones, Mount Eden, planted in the vineyard back in 2007. The clonal selection stems from its namesake vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains, owned by our good friends, Jeff and Ellie Patterson. It was planted in 1943 by Martin Ray with cuttings taken from Paul Masson’s La Cresta vineyard planted in 1895–1896, which was itself planted from cuttings said to be straight from Burgundy. The selection is prized for its small berries and aromatic intensity. Mount Eden tends to develop over a much longer time period than other clones, requiring even more patience than that which we already exercise as vignerons. Similar to the Pommard clone in Fugio, its small clusters and lignified stems made it an ideal candidate for cane pruning and whole cluster fermentation, which adds both spice and tannins to the wine.

  Suggested Retail Price: $70.00
• 2021 Détente Pinot Noir

  Santa Barbara County/Sta. Rita Hills/Pence Vineyards

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  Similar to our experience with our earlier discovery of the Heritage Pinot, Détente is a blend of two adjacent blocks in our Estate vineyard. This all-new cuvee is a result of our first tasting of the 2021 vintage, an annual exercise wherein we methodically analyze the fully fermented juice from each block and evaluate the results. Some blocks, such as Unum and Fugio, are known quantities; however, given that we are sampling from ten different plots of pinot noir alone, there is always a bit of discovery as well. For several years, our adjacent plantings of the workhorse French Dijon Clone 115 and the first UC Davis clone, Pommard (named after the original cuttings taken from the famous Burgundy Village in 1951), have impressed us by producing delicious fruit that has added great depth and character to the Estate wines we have made from them. As the vines have aged, their uniqueness has become more and more pronounced. That said, and given our success in developing Heritage as a cuvee, we thought it could be interesting to see how the fruit from these two parcels might integrate. The result was fantastic, and we could not be more pleased! While the clonal characteristics are quite different, there are numerous similarities at play here. Both blocks share the same soil types and therefore were planted with t

  Suggested Retail Price: $70.00