• 2015 Pinot Noir
    Deep End
    Anderson Valley, Mendocino
    • (750 ml) Sold Out!
    • (Magnum) Sold Out!
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The differences in wine quality between one plot of land and another have been observed for centuries in France. In Burgundy the highest vineyard classification is Grand Cru, and the name of the vineyard, Bonnes-Mares for example, will appear on the wine label even more prominently than the producer's name, showing the economic value of the vineyard's identity. All three Pinots we produce, our inexpensive Anderson Valley bottling, the food-friendly Méthode à l'Ancienne cuvée and this wine, our complex Deep End Blend, come from a single vineyard, namely Navarro. However, within Navarro we have twenty-nine different blocks of Pinot Noir in our Philo vineyards alone, and many blocks are further divided by trellis or canopy management;


[above] Bill pouring a magnum of an older vintage of Deep End Pinot. Navarro's regime of selecting the best vineyard lots, aging in French oak barrels for sixteen months and finishing with an unfiltered bottling assures a long life for our Deep End Pinots. They typically don't reach their best until about six to eight years after harvest. As of this newsletter, the 1999 is still a pleasure to drink.
Night harvesting Pinot Noir under floodlights. [below] Navarro's Pinot Noir fields are divided into blocks where either the clone and/or rootstock change. Some blocks make very good wine every vintage but it is difficult to predict which of these blocks will produce the single best lot of wine in any particular vintage.

we fermented and aged forty-one separate Pinot Noir wines in 2015. In our decades of making Pinot Noir wines from the same fields, we have never found a wine from a single site that couldn't be improved by blending in another wine or wines from nearby fields. This wine is a cuvée selected from the best eight wines produced from our Philo-grown grapes in 2015. After selecting the exact blend percentages, the wines were racked and combined in August 2016, then returned to barrels for an additional six months of aging. Navarro's Pinot Noir vines produced a modest crop in 2015, so we could only produce seventy-five percent of the normal production of this, our most complex Pinot; a special occasion wine, with aromas of Christmas spices that complement roast duck or goose. Gold Medal winner. Best of Class.

Specifications
  • Harvested: Aug. 26 to Sept. 10, 2015
  • Sugars at harvest: 24.2 Brix
  • Bottled: Feb. 23, 2017
  • Cases released: 498
  • Alcohol: 13.7%
  • Titratable acidity: 6.3 g/L
  • pH: 3.60