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96 JD. "Considered the flagship vineyard of the estate, the 2016 Pinot Noir Summa Old Vines comes from vines planted in 1978 and was brought up in 50% new French oak. It is a vibrant, focused, exotic effort that reveals incredible notes of raspberries, plums, cedary spice, blood orange, and earth. Medium-bodied, beautifully balanced, with a sappy, energetic texture and fine tannin, it needs 2-3 years of bottle age and will keep for two decades or more. Rivers Marie is the joint project between the husband wife team of Thomas Rivers Brown (of Schrader) and Genevieve Marie Welsh. The label was created in 2002 and includes wines from both Napa and Sonoma. Their Sonoma focus (which is the focus on this report) is on cool climate sites, and the Summa Vineyard, which was purchased by Brown and Welsh in 2010 located far out in the Occidental Ridge region of the Sonoma Coast, can be thought of as the heart of the estate. I tasted four Chardonnays for this report and six different Pinot Noir, all having singular and distinctive characters, which isn’t a given. These are elegant, Burgundian-styled wines that will benefit from short term cellaring, and I suspect be very long lived." Jeb Dunnuck, JebDunnuck.com, Jun 2018 |