Winemaking
Winemaking Philosophy
Our goal is to produce Pinot Noir that best captures the distinct flavor and character of a given vineyard site.
We focus on Pinot Noir from sites that provide us with exceptional fruit.
We are fanatical in our protection of the vineyard flavor and determined not to let any overt winemaking interventions mute the personality of an individual site. In the cellar, we vinifiy each wine separately by block, clone and barrel type in order to maximize the individual components and provide greater complexity to the final blend. This approach also provides us with much more flexibility in crafting a wine using only the best and most harmonious lots.
For both our single vineyard and AVA offerings, it is critical for us to maintain the individual vineyard’s and wider region’s character in order to provide you with a truly diverse offering of wines.
To that end: We believe in minimal intervention, “gentle” winemaking. In other words, whenever possible we let the wine make itself. We will not want to do anything to the wine that isn’t absolutely necessary.
We believe in bottling our wines unfiltered and unfined.
In the vast majority of cases we have been able to achieve this, with only a handful of Pinots ever having been filtered and none ever having been fined. We avoid these techniques as we believe they have the potential to strip a wine of its flavor. We believe that the best Pinot Noir expresses its origins. Our goal is not to produce the world’s best Pinot Noir but rather to produce the very best Pinot Noir from a given site or region.
