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WS 91 points: Polished, focused and enticing for its floral, white pepper-accented currant and blackberry flavors, playing against a mild grip of fine tannins as the finish lingers.
Stephen Tanzer's International Wine Cellar 90 points: Bright ruby. Black raspberry and flowers on the nose, with a strong undertone of musky spices that gains strength in the glass. Pliant, palate-coating dark berry flavors are appealingly open-knit. Nicely ripe but quite light on its feet, finishing very good clarity, spiciness and lingering sweetness.
WE 89 points: A feminine, almost soft Pinot Noir, this opens nicely with scents of roses, red fruits, and pine forest. Despite its light color, it has plenty of grip and density in the mouth, even bringing some streaks of light milk chocolate into the finish.
Winemaker's notes: A rich, dark, focused, and balanced Pinot Noir, this is a very nice introduction for 2008. Perfectly colored red-purple-black, this well-extracted wine carries gobs of fruit, good structure, and a nice, long finish. Exotic aromas and flavors of clove, cardamom, pepper spice, mineral, orange marmalade, green tea, and plum as well as herbal and brown forest-floor characters make this wine complex and always evolving. It is still tightly wound at release, with great acid and a moderate weight that will plump even more with age. We wish we were able to make more of this wine.
Winery Notes: This is our most widely distributed and earliest available Pinot Noir. It is a wine blended from all of our vineyards and bottled before the single-vineyard and reserve wines. The complementary nature of the lots that go into this blend is obvious in its full, early integration and its occasionally being considered superior to single-vineyard wines. ALL Pinots are made with the same care, receive the same oak, are from the same Estate Vineyards, etc. — the 3 Vineyard represents the very populist notion that egos and individuality may elevate some brothers and sisters, but the rest of us together are just as wise and powerful, sometimes even more so. Beginning in 2003, with the reduction of single-vineyard bottling production quantities, barrels of single-vineyard quality are now returned to the 3 Vineyard blend for even greater complexity.
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