The 2015 vintage is the second of three fantastic vintages in the Willamette Valley. The Yamhill-Carlton Pinot Noir is a blend of fruit from the famed Gran Moraine Vineyard as well as the vineyard located at Gran Moraine Winery. Various rootstocks and clones make up the vineyards, and this wide variety gave us a huge range of fruit and flavors to work with in blending this wine. This wine is a ripe, rich Oregon Pinot Noir, and yet on the finish it has a tension and acidity that leads one to say that this is definitively Oregon at its finest....

This is a beautifully complete version of the Rosella’s Vineyard Pinot Noir. Lifted and perfumed to start with, the mouth is dominated by red fruits and floral elements. In the mid-palate the wine takes on more depth and hints of dark fruits and some slight herbal elements (from the whole cluster ferments) become apparent in the wine. The overall balance and velvet character of the wine comes through on the finish where the wine is long, persistent and without any obtrusive elements....

The 2015 vintage was our first opportunity to work with fruit from the famed Zena Crown Vineyard. We were completely blown away with the quality of the grapes. We picked our sections of the vineyard over a two-week period, bringing in six different sections of grapes and making six different wines out of them. In the Spring of 2016, we sat down and tasted through each section and came up with a blend that represented what we believed to be the best Siduri Zena Crown Vineyard offering from the vintage....

Tiny yields and early ripening gave us extra concentration in color and flavor at Keefer Ranch. We did not stray from our typical 5 day cold soak prior to fermentation. The blend is comprised of 4 clones/blocks: 777, Pommard, 114 and clone 23. We utilized about 33% stem inclusion on the fermentation to add backbone and lift aromatics. The wine was aged in 40% new French oak barrels then bottled un-fined, unfiltered....

Renowned wine writer Antonio Galloni has already reviewed this wine and gave it a 91 point rating, describing it this way, “Savory herbs, tobacco, licorice, mint and earth notes give the 2015 Pinot Noir Van Der Kamp Vineyard its distinctive, mountain influenced personality. The intensity of the vintage is evident, but there is more than enough complexity and aromatic nuance to complement the richness of the fruit. This is a very pretty wine.”...

In addition to showing great fruit concentration, Garys’ Vineyard Pinot Noir has a good backbone and a unique savory edge that truly makes it both appealing and complex simultaneously....

Right next door to the Muirfield Vineyard, but differing from Muirfield in that it is planted largely on rootstock, the Hawks View Pinot Noir always shows a bit riper and richer than its neighbor. In 2015 it ripened earlier than ever before, as we started picking in mid-September. A bit more dark fruit rather than red, more blackberries mixed with dried herbs and earth, this Pinot Noir should only develop more complexity with 2-3 years in the bottle...

The Lingenfelder Vineyard is in a particularly cool spot in the Russian River Valley. The wine is a blend of old school Pinot Noir clones with half of the blend being Pommard and the other half being the Martini clone. The wine is about 10% whole cluster fermented, just enough to give some complexity to the wine, but not so much to stand out. This wine was aged entirely in 1-4 year old French oak and was bottled without fining or filtration....

The Pratt—Sexton Vineyard is on Sexton Road, between Sebastopol and Occidental on the Sonoma Coast. This hillside vineyard is farmed by Jim Pratt, one of our best friends in the wine business and one of California’s finest grape growers (Jim also manages the Ewald, Parsons’, and Betty Ann Vineyards for us). We harvest 3 different clones at the Pratt—Sexton property including a somewhat mysterious Jackson clone which was isolated from old Pinot Noir plantings in Jackson, California....

The Soberanes Vineyard is in the heart of the Santa Lucia Highlands, directly to the south of the Garys’ Vineyard. This is one of our newer vineyards, with our first crop there being 2010. We’ve often found that vineyards can do very well the first year or two but that they sometimes go into a “teenage stage” after a couple of vintages and attempt to ripen too much fruit and grow too much in the way of vegetation without having the root structure established to make that happen successfully (there are all sorts of teenage analogies here)....

The Barbieri Vineyard is an amazing site. We purchased fruit from the Barbieri Vineyard almost 15 years ago. At that time the vineyard was planted to Zinfandel and produced a superb wine, although the vines were heavily virused. It was obvious that the vineyard needed to be replanted and, when the property sold it was replanted to Pinot Noir. Now, after some years (and another sale) we once again have access to this superb plot of land. Last year it seemed so different, walking rows that were once planted to head-trained vines and now were younger, vertical-shoot positioned vines....

The most complete and complex Willamette Valley Pinot Noir that Siduri has ever produced. This is a wine that shows the character of the full Willamette Valley. Darker berry and currant flavors, along with hints of cherry joined by earth, dried brush, and even tobacco flavors....

The key to our 2015 Siduri Russian River Valley Pinot Noir is in the diversity of sources. This sounds odd, given that the wine comes entirely from within the Russian River Valley AVA, but this region is large and possesses a myriad of soils, exposures, and unique terroirs that together produce a superb representation of the whole of the Russian River Valley. This 2015 offering showcases this area in all its complexity while also making for a wine that is imminently drinkable upon release....

Somehow the John Sebastiano Vineyard has moved from one of the newer, high quality vineyards in the Sta. Rita Hills Appellation to one of the standard bearers of the region. Odd how that happens with the passage of time. Sitting on the eastern edge of the AVA this vineyard is a bit warmer than other parts of the Sta. Rita Hills, but it is also more affected by the wind than some other parts of the area. That is because it is situated on some incredibly steep slopes that face directly west and directly into the winds that stream in from the Pacific Ocean....

The Sierra Mar Vineyard is near the southern end of the Santa Lucia Highlands Appellation and is one of our higher elevation and steeper vineyards. At the southern end of the AVA, vineyards are not so much contiguous as they are islands of plantings, separated from one another and yet all called by the name of one vineyard. At Sierra Mar these plantings tend to either be along small ridges or in swales between the ridges....

The 2016 Siduri Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir is a red fruited wine with superb concentration and balance. Having only been bottled a few months ago, it is still a bit tight on the finish, but really opens up after being open for several hours. If you’re going to drink this wine now, give it some air (or a good decanting) or let it sit in the cellar for a couple of years....

Right next door to the Muirfield Vineyard, but differing from Muirfield in that it is planted largely on rootstock, the Hawks View Pinot Noir always shows a bit riper and richer than its neighbor. In 2015 it ripened earlier than ever before, as we started picking in mid-September....

The most complete and complex Willamette Valley Pinot Noir that Siduri has ever produced. This is a wine that shows the character of the full Willamette Valley. Darker berry and currant flavors, along with hints of cherry joined by earth, dried brush, and even tobacco flavors....

Siduri’s second wine from the Saralee’s Vineyard comes from an unusual part of this iconic property. There’s one small section that is called “the Expansion Block.” This section was planted primarily as a source for cuttings for further plantings on this property and others. Accordingly, virtually every other row is planted to a different clone. That makes sampling, and deciding when to pick the grapes, far more difficult than at other vineyards. The winemaking on the 2016 Siduri Saralee’s Vineyard Pinot Noir was quite straightforward....

The Parsons Vineyard is in the Santa Rosa Plain section of the Russian River Valley. This area is just west of the winery and is characterized by compact soils full of clay and rather flat topography. None of which sounds particularly great for high quality Pinot Noir. However, over the years the Parsons Vineyard has seemingly defied our preconceived notions and produced one of our top Pinot Noirs virtually every vintage. The 2016 vintage is no exception as it has once again provided us with one of the more compelling examples of classic Russian River Valley Pinot Noir....

Much of California had a surprisingly good-sized crop in 2016. The one area that did have low yields was, unfortunately, the Sta. Rita Hills. Both cluster sizes and berry sizes were down. We sourced fruit from more sources than ever before in the region (Clos Pepe, John Sebastiano Vineyard, La Encantada, Hilliard-Bruce) and yet we still ended up with less wine. The 2016 Siduri Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir shows great complexity and concentration, due in part to our greater combination of source locations....

The Clos Pepe Vineyard in Santa Barbara’s Sta. Rita Hills AVA is undoubtedly one of our most famous vineyards. Sometimes fame is undeserved and sometimes it is fleeting, but neither of those is anywhere close to true when it comes to Clos Pepe. This vineyard is the real deal and we’ve been incredibly fortunate to have worked with fruit from Clos Pepe since 2000. We source fruit from 3 different sections of Clos Pepe, two of them are planted to 115 clone with one section planted to Pommard....