2008 Pinot Noir Grand Cuvee
	Quantity in Basket: none Code: PNGC2008 Price:$35.00 Shipping Weight: 3.60 pounds
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2008 PINOT NOIR, GRAND CUVEE Sta. Rita Hills – Estate Grown Winemaker’s Notes: There are a lot of descriptions out there for wines. On the more extracted, concentrated end of things, you hear such things as “ripe, dark, fat, tannic, huge, monster,” etc. On the lighter end of the scale you hear, “delicate, smooth, finessed, transparent, user friendly, easy to drink,” etc. With this ’08 Grand Cuvee Pinot, I’d put it right in the middle categorically, and the description I like is “pretty.” Pinot Noir does not naturally make huge, extracted wines. While you can mold Pinot into a super dark, tannic wine, that’s not really what it wants to be naturally. At the same time, for it to be successful, for it to have that nuance and mystery, you do have to work at capturing a certain degree of character. Otherwise, it can fall into that lighter end of the scale kind of wine. With this particular bottling of Grand Cuvee, the Pinot genie is definitely in the bottle. The flavors in this wine are quintessential. It’s like, when you grow balanced, mature Pinot Noir in the Highway 246 corridor of the Santa Rita Hills, this is how it is. Smokey cherries and an amalgam of spice are all wrapped together into a soft sweet package. At 13.7% alcohol it has the easy drinking aspects of a lighter wine, with the more powerfully mesmerizing aspects of a fully developed Pinot Noir. Some of its power comes from the Ocean’s Ghost section of my vineyard. In fact, with the recession lingering, I decided to take some of the gallonage out of the Ocean’s Ghost bottling and blend it into this one. The pedigree of the grapes is good and I think it shows. And I have every reason to believe that this wine will do exactly what the 2007 bottling did, which was to simply get richer and more complex after it sat in the bottle for a year. Cheers, Bryan Technical Notes: VINIFICATION: pH: 3.64 TA: 6.8 g/L; RESIDUAL SUGAR: Dry; ALCOHOL: 13.7% PERCENTAGE OF NEW BARRELS: 35 % New French Oak; TIME IN BARREL: 10 months BOTTLING DATE: August 2009 RELEASE DATE: October 2009 TOTAL PRODUCTION: 886 cases 12/750ml Click Here for an Adobe Reader PDF version of Bryan Babcock's vintage note on 2008 Pinot Noir Grand Cuvee.