2016 La Pitchoune Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast 750 ml

The 2016 La Pitchoune Pinot Noir is what we pour when someone asks for a California Pinot Noir recommendation. It’s the one we consistently hold up when explaining our love for the Sonoma Coast’s world-class Pinots. In fact, this bottle has single-handedly made Wine Access staff into La Pitchoune wine club members. 

It’s the only way we can be sure of getting some: La Pitchoune’s tiny releases and single-vineyard bottlings are swiftly snapped up by an obsessive following. 

Michelin-starred destinations like The French Laundry and SingleThread Farms are usually first in line. For this masterful, spice-laden blend from three renowned vineyards, we can boast that we were the last in line—we scooped the last remaining bottles of the vintage from the winery’s cellars.  

Gorgeously round, plush, and supple, the 2016 La Pitchoune Pinot Noir is the kind of sensational, hard-to-find bottling that delivers on the access our name promises. It comes from the Sonoma Coast, where rugged conditions and intensive farming can drive prices well into the $100 range, which makes this kind of pricing incredible—the equivalent of seeing three cherries line up on the slot machine as a flood of coins jangles into the tin tray.

The 2016 Sonoma Coast bottling is a point of pride for co-founder Tracy Nielsen, who fell in love with this region and, from La Pitchoune’s very first vintage of 2012, has insisted on working only with small farmers. Most of the vineyards she sources from are just a few acres of low-yielding vines. The winery only handles 20 tons of fruit a year, all of it worked by hand and personally overseen by Tracy and her winemaker, Chasseur veteran and Bill Hunter protegé Andrew Berge.

“We’re pretty obsessed with terroir,” Tracy told us, as we tasted this wine at a picnic table overlooking one of her favorite vineyards. “To me, if you’re going to call something Sonoma Coast, I have an expectation of what that should taste like, as opposed to Russian River Valley or Sonoma Mountain.” 

As expressed in this Pinot Noir, that identity for her is all about the bramble versus the berry—an earthy underbelly and salty minerality that pervades the cascade of blue fruits, blackberry, and blueberry, accented with a woody complexity.

This bottling is assembled from three sites: English Hill Vineyard, a foggy, clay-based site just nine miles from the ocean; the family-run Devoto Vineyard, occupying prime real estate across the street from Littorai in Sebastopol; and the Holder Vineyard, comprising just over one acre in western Sonoma County. Gifted with the warm balance of the 2016 vintage, the grapes were picked early for acidity and saw minimum intervention before being dressed in a light sheen of oak influence.