Habit Pinot Noir 2014

For winemaker Jeff Fischer, the quest to find what made a good wine great led to a decade of experimentation, trial and error. His first label, Casa Pescador, was a crowning achievement for an amateur winemaker. But it was mostly a friends-and-family affair. The chosen grapes and methodologies worked well, yet the results were inconsistent. Having had a taste of the magic that was possible, it was time for Jeff to take things to another level. His home operation had outgrown itself. It was time to move up to 'boutique'. And it was time to make a truly great wine, and all great wines start with the right grape...

Jeff has been to just about every corner of California and beyond in his search for the right grape to make the wine on his mind. To cut a years-long story short, he finally found what he was looking for in 2007, standing in a field in Happy Canyon, Santa Barbara County.

The map that led Jeff to Happy Canyon was drawn from countless conversations with wine lovers and vintners; both novices and experts whom he hoped could help him find what he was looking for. In Happy Canyon, the microclimate, the soil, the soft pacific breeze all combine to give birth to some of the finest Bordeaux grape varietals to come out of California. Jeff knew he had found his grape.

With so many years of frustrated experience under his belt, Jeff soon also found friends and accomplices in the region, each of them drawn to this point of convergence, each of them with a different wine on their mind. Their friendship, generosity of expertise and passion for the process has helped Jeff bring my own Habit into the public domain. Handcrafted, using artisanal methods in a state of the art facility, Habit is everything he hoped it would be.