Red Car Estate Vineyard Pinot Noir 2012
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Heftier than the producer’s Platt Vineyard Pinot, this estate-grown wine features astoundingly bright acidity around dense black cherry fruit. It saw 10% stem inclusion during fermentation and was aged in 20% new oak for just over a year, a recipe that works to buoy the wine and give it plenty of complexity.
Red Car was founded in 2000 when Mark Estrin, Carroll Kemp and Richard Crowell produced 50 cases of wine from a single ton of Syrah grapes in a Culver City garage. In a nod to their Los Angeles roots, the new venture was named Red Car after the trolley line that ferried riders across the region for the first half of the twentieth century.
In 2004, they purchased 125 acres of land and began developing vineyards in the wild coastal ridges north of Sonoma County’s Bodega Bay, a region now known as the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA. Here, the interplay of warm sunshine, cool Pacific breezes and sandstone soils could yield the age-worthy wines of structure and complexity that had captured their imagination.
Today, under the direction of viticulturist, Greg Adams, and winemaker, Tanner Scheer, Red Car farms five dramatic vineyards including Heaven & Earth, Zephyr Farms, Mohrhardt Ridge, Hagan, and The Estate. This rugged terrain's coastal influence—where the Pacific fog filters in daily through giant redwoods until warm sunshine sends it back out to the sea—provides perfect growing conditions for their hallmark style: perfumed aromatics, bright fruit, crisp texture and uplifting acidity. Red Car is passionately committed to producing wines of purity and focus that express the authentic varietal character and terroir of each unique coastal vineyard site. At the core, Red Car is a small, independent farming operation committed to conservation and sustainability.
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.”
On the far western edge of the larger Sonoma Coast appellation, the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA hugs right up against the Pacific coast. Vineyards, planted at rugged elevations between 920 to 1,800 feet, occupy only two percent of the total land in the AVA. Fort Ross-Seaview growers believe that the region boasts an ideal mix of sunshine, cool air and beneficial stress for producing high quality Chardonnay and Pinot noir.