Claiborne & Churchill Classic Pinot Noir 2018
-
Wine
Enthusiast
Product Details
Your Rating
Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
The wine shows aromas of confectionery, strawberry and flowers, with red fruit favors of ripe cherry and dark plums. A particularly pleasant note is the silky mouthfeel; with its soft acidity and nice length, the wine is immensely quaffable! We suggest pairing it with duck confit, grilled salmon, or woodfired flatbread.
Professional Ratings
-
Wine Enthusiast
Brisk raspberry and dark-cherry aromas meet with turned earth and dried sage on the nose of this delicious bottling. The palate is zesty out of the gates, with wild cherry and dried herb flavors riding a chalky, extremely tight texture into a vanilla-kissed finish. It's a classic indeed.
Editors' Choice
Other Vintages
2019-
Wine
Enthusiast
-
Wine
Enthusiast
-
Wilfred
Wong
In 1995 Clay and Fredericka completed construction on their new and permanent winery building. This structure, a noteworthy example of environmental architecture, is a "straw bale building," the first of its kind in California. With sixteen-inch thick walls made of bales of rice straw, the winery is so well insulated that it maintains a constant cellar temperature, without the need for mechanical cooling or heating.
At Claiborne & Churchill traditional European winemaking techniques prevail, including extensive use of barrel-fermentation and barrel-aging (even with Riesling and Gewürztraminer), minimal manipulation of juice and wine, "natural" or spontaneous fermentation using indigenous yeast, and limited use of SO2, all in the belief that the winemaker's task is to bring out the flavor and character that is latent in the grape. Our aim is to create pleasurable dinner wines in which there is a harmonious balance of fruit and oak, structure and texture.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
California’s coolest wine growing area, Edna Valley excels in the production of high quality Central Coast wines like Pinot noir, Chardonnay, Rhône Blends and aromatic white wines. It has a cool Mediterranean climate and an incredibly long growing season, giving late-ripening varieties plenty of opportunity to develop great phenolic complexity.
Its northwest to southeast orientation creates a direct path for cool Pacific air and fog to penetrate the valley from the Los Osos and Morro Bay area inwards. Low hillsides of both calcareous and volcanic soils are home to much of the vineyard acreage of the Edna Valley.