2016 Rapley Trail Vineyard Pinot Noir

The 2016 Vintage was another drought year, with early bud-break, bloom and veraison. Poor weather during the early bloom caused shatter and millerandage. Vine stress became an issue late in the year with many of our dry farmed vines showing water and nutrient stress for the first time. The resulting wines are bright and energetic with mid-weight personalities. These are profoundly aromatic and balanced wines that are site expressive and pure.

"From a site that was incredibly stressed in the vintage, which resulted in miniscule yields, the 2016 Pinot Noir Rapley Trail Vineyard offers a terrific sense of minerality as well as ample mulberry and cherry fruits, subtle rose petal and floral nuances, medium body, and thrilling elegance and finesse. It’s vibrant, tight, and compact, yet has a great finish, all pointing to it needing short term cellaring. I’d hide bottles for 3-4 years and it should keep beautifully for 15+ in good cellars. It’s a class act." -Jeb Dunnuck, 96 points
Our winemaking is focused on allowing the unique signature of each vineyard site to be expressed. We ferment all of our Pinot Noir in small lots of between one and two tons. We utilize varying percentages of whole bunches (approximately 25-50%), tailored to each site, and ferment the wines without the addition of yeast. Our maceration period lasts from 10-21 days, often including a short per-fermentation cold soak. We age our Pinot Noir in 3 year air dried French Oak, exclusively from the forest of Chatillon. The wines are pressed in a traditional basket press and allowed to settle before barrelling. The wines spend two winters in barrel and are racked only at bottling.
The Rapley Trail Vineyard (avg. elev. 1650 ft.) was planted in 1981, consisting of six contiguous acres of Pinot Noir vines on our Estate’s rugged southeastern slopes. It has long been the backbone of our past "Estate Reserve" Pinot Noir, but beginning in 2002 we have begun to bottle portions of the vineyard separately. This "deconstruction" displays the unique aspects and interactions of soil and climate that accounts for grapes whose flavor is a direct product of where they are grown; this is terroir. The Rapley Trail Vineyard bottling is comprised of the various lots harvested from the vineyard, which in some years can be picked in as many as 7 passes.