2000 Pisoni Vineyard

The fruit was brought into the winery and was customarily triaged. This is a rather tedious and labor intensive part of the winemaking process but one that I think is the most important. My willingness to throw less than perfect clusters out remains one of the keys to the concept of non interventionist winemaking. I am convinced that if you can insure that only clean healthy fruit finds its way in to your open tops then very little will be required of you in terms of detection and treatment of wine defects. This can only be done if you absolutely look at each and every cluster as it drops in to the fermenter. In this case we spent approximately 6 hours hand sorting.

The Vineyard
Several parcels now comprise the now famous Pisoni Vineyard. The Main block and the Elias block seem to be the source of the best Pinot Noir fruit. Although I suspect the others will catch up quickly. The fruit for this wine comes from perhaps the most coveted parcel on the ranch. It is at the top of the main block and contains the steepest slope. These are some of the oldest vines on the property and perhaps has the best chance to make the best wine. It is planted to a unilateral cordon with a vertical shoot positioning. With a unilateral cordon you get less fruit generally because you have half of the fruiting canes on the plant. The vertical shoot enables the farmer to prune in a way that allows the clusters to develop in a symmetrical line thus giving uniform ripeness across the clusters. The south east facing slope gives this vineyard optimal sun exposure and the vineyard is set back out of the fog line that is so prominent in the Santa Lucia Highlands. Matt Kramer once explained to me that Pisoni Vineyard was in a nexus meaning that it was just outside of the area where you think you should plant Pinot just slightly warmer thus giving it something distinctive and amazing. He said only the greatest vineyards are planted in the nexus.

The Production
My aspirations for this vineyard are somewhat different than many of the producers working with this fruit. The tendency to harvest very ripe and sometimes overripe grapes to produce a highly extracted wine with deep color and intensity and yes high alcohol has become the norm and has met with both critical and consumer success. While I applaud my colleagues for their successes I do not subscribe to their theories that this is the best way to make Pinot Noir here in California. Don’t get me wrong I have been tempted to take this path of least resistance and to conform to what I call the McDonalds method of winemaking but alas I cannot bring myself to purposely throw in the towel. Rather I am looking for much more elegance and balance. I choose to harvest with much more modest sugar levels and much higher natural acidity. The belief that my wines will continue to evolve in the bottle for years to come and that this continued evolution will ultimately produce a much more interesting wine is what drives our philosophy of winegrowing.

The fruit was fermented in 1.5 ton open tops and was cold soaked for 72 hours at 10 degrees centigrade. Inoculation was begun using RC212 yeast and nutrients to insure their growth. Fermentation lasted a total of nine days and was pressed off at 1 degree brix directly to new Francois Freres barrels all from the Allier forest. These were chateau barrels with a heavy toast treatment. The wine continued to ferment and completed malolactic on October 17th. At that time it received an addition sulphur and was put to bed for of the winter. This wine remained on its gross lees until the time of bottling which took place on March 15th 2002. The wine was released to the public after 13 months in bottle on May 1 2003.