2017 Joyce Vineyards Pinot Noir Submarine Canyon Monterey County 750 ml

Honest and Unmanipulated at an Unbeatable Price

When Russell Joyce fell for wine, it was a bottle of Pinot Noir that did him in. He was only 19, and couldn’t afford the $50+ bottles that obsessed critics and wine enthusiasts. So, when Russell’s dad, a former pro racecar driver turned dentist, offered to let him take over their 1,000-case hobby winery, the younger Joyce began charting a course to make the purest expression of Pinot Noir from Monterey County that nature would afford him. Today, at age 32, we’re telling every Pinot-lover that he is one up-and-comer to watch. Why?

The 2017 Joyce Vineyards Submarine Canyon Pinot Noir is a $20 Pinot that is easily confused for a $50 bottle—an honest wine, made with minimal intervention, boasting the complex structure of a single-vineyard or Premier Cru Pinot, and bursting with pure fruit expression, energy, tension, and vibrancy. For a self-made winemaker in his early 30s, it’s an incredible feat.  

“I grew up on our estate, and I worked every weekend, before and after sports, so when I was young I looked at winemaking as just work,” Joyce admits. “But I came around, and at 19, I started to see wine as a sexy thing. For me, I think bright red, fresh fruit, acid, a lifted saline minerality, and tension, and that’s stylistically how I make Pinot Noir.”

Joyce credits just two people for teaching him to make wine: his dad and Dan Karlsen, a family friend and wine industry veteran who helped steer the ship at Domaine Carneros, Dehlinger, Chalone, and Talbott. From both, he learned to love Monterey Bay.

“Submarine Canyon” is his ode to Monterey’s deep ocean abyss (as deep as the Grand Canyon), which “has a huge climactic impact on farming,” Joyce says. His 2017 Pinot Noir is named after the canyon and draws upon three distinct vineyards: Danny Franscioni Vineyard, De Tierra, and Mission Ranch.

Franscioni’s site is perched at 800 feet elevation in the Gabilan Mountain Range—also home to Chalone and Calera. Limestone deposits in the soil contribute broadness and density in the wine. At De Tierra, organically farmed Pinot Noir is rooted in chalk-rock laden steep slopes—vines struggle to reach nutrients, and nights are very cool, all contributing tension and energy in the final wine. Mission Ranch Vineyard in Arroyo Seco is an extremely windy site, blanketed every day by a thick layer of marine fog. The site is a well-draining alluvial bench, ancient run-off of the Santa Lucia Highlands, littered with old granite riverbed rocks. Submarine Canyon owes its saline-like mineral structure to these vines.

After whole-cluster and stem-contact during a four-day cold-soak, “to build a framework of depth and texture,” Joyce lets naturally occurring yeasts from the vineyards work their fermentation magic. Once gently pressed, the Pinot spends just 10 months in neutral barrels because Joyce likes the “energy captured” during a shorter aging period. Of the 2,000 cases made, very few remain.