2008 "The Shop" Carneros Pinot Noir

SOLD OUT!

For the last several years, I’ve been trying to steer my Pinot Noir wines in the direction of subtlety and perfume. Big extracted Pinot Noirs are commonplace now; purity, subtlety and delicacy are harder to find. But “The Shop” won’t entirely cooperate. It seems to make big, bold, rich wine every year. Not at the expense, I hope, of aroma and complexity, but I am often surprised, as I was in 2008, at just how big it is. Now, I would never want to make a wine into something it is not, and I have a long history of making Carneros Pinot Noir from my years at Saintsbury, so know a bit about how sturdy Carneros Pinots can be. But it strikes me as slightly ironic that early in my career I worried about my Pinot Noir wines being, well, of insufficient size, and now I worry about them being too big. 2008 was a crazy year—spring frosts led to smaller than expected yields. But the growing season ran hot and cold, literally. There were the well publicized wildfires, which Carneros mercifully managed to avoid. Finally, as we came down the home stretch, there was a late August heat spell that compelled me to pick the Shop about a week earlier than I originally intended. Luckily, I managed to dodge the worst of the heat (I used to be one of the last winemakers to pick. Now I am one of the first) and the fruit came in looking good and tasting good. The resulting wine is deep red and quite rich, a little on the ripe side but still with fresh fruit character. Like previous “Shops,” it likes a little air. It is not a shrinking violet. 450 cases.

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