2018 Color & Sound Pinot Noir Sonoma County 750 ml

Have the times changed for value-driven Pinot Noir? Look no further than the fog-shrouded hills of Sonoma County to see just how high the “value” bar has been set, and how much it has risen over the last decade. It wasn’t so long ago that twenty bucks could regularly get you a great bottle of Sonoma Pinot. 

These days, top bottlings fetch $50-$75+ a pop, while the value-finds land between $30-$40. Still, that doesn’t stop us from knocking on every door and looking for every opportunity. Today, opportunity knocks for Pinot-lovers.  

The grapes hail from biodynamically-farmed estate vines planted in 1989 near the town of Sebastopol. Over the years, the source winery has amassed an impressive collection of 94+ point Decanter and Wine Enthusiast scores and a slew of Decanter Gold medals. A bottle of their estate Pinot runs $49 to $65. 

But the well-documented 2018 bumper crop presented a dilemma—with a surplus of perfectly ripe grapes with high natural acids, the choices for winemakers were: bottle more, drop fruit, or harvest and find the right home. Our friends at the Sonoma winery we can’t name chose the last option, and we landed on ten choice barrels at a bargain price. It’s how we’re able to offer 250 cases of this soft, silken, red-fruit driven, spicy and earth-laden premium Sonoma Pinot Noir for just $20 a bottle (down to $15 each on case-buys). 

Bottling what might have been a $50 Pinot under one label for $20 under another isn’t rocket science—but it is a rarity that only comes about with luck, deep connections, and a solid reputation. With the 2018 Color & Sound Pinot, the kind of quality-to-price ratio contained in one bottle is exactly the result of all three.

First, luck struck when Wine Spectator’s report “Sonoma Sings of an Ideal Year,” broke the news that the 2018 harvest was of epic proportions and quality. David Ramey called it “just beautiful, from start to finish,” while Jason Kesner of Kistler Vineyards noted “excellent development of flavors and retention of great natural acidity across the wines.” In trying to maintain his small production levels, Paul Hobbs cited “four full thinning passes.”  

Second, our deep connections all over Northern California never seemed to ring as loudly as in the fall of 2018—and we mean that literally: We received calls from producers with surplus grapes daily. And one particular phone call led us to a small biodynamically farmed winery near Sebastopol.

Our friend Alexis had been singing our praises to the owner of the winery that was looking for the right partner to handle their surplus Pinot. Lucky for us, the owner was a fan of Wine Access, so we could cut right to the chase. She was also entranced by Alexis, who, as longtime fans of Color & Sound already know, possesses a “colorful” gift: Alexis experiences wine as shapes, colors, and sounds. Her synesthesia keeps us on the edge of our seats at tastings because her descriptions of wine are hypnotizing. 

Case in point is how she described the Pinot Noir to the winery owner the day we visited to taste from each barrel. We hit “record” on our phone just before she started describing the wine.

“It’s focused, with curvaceous, zig-zagging lines and rises to peaks miles into the sky,” began Alexis. “That’s how the acid appears to me,” she explained. “But it’s also round, fluid, and abstract, like those Salvador Dali clocks in ‘Persistence of Memory.’ That’s the fruit profile—raspberry flavors are drops of crimson red, wild strawberry is neon pink rivulets, and all the spices are like waves of mauve and there are these emerald ribbons of chopped chervil, beneath a purple-brown floor of newly tilled earth. And it all builds to a symphony of collisions, like watching a lava lamp bubble and bulge, I get that kind of feeling when I experience the soft and silky texture of the wine, the explosion of ripe fruit flavors that just seem to meld into one another, breaking off into larger bubbles of red cherry and smaller droplets of strawberry, down to minuscule beads that are clove, orange peel, and cocoa dust.”

“Wow,” someone said, cutting short what could have been a contemplative quiet. “Do you really see and experience all that in the wine?” 

“Yup, I do,” Alexis offered through a smile and shrug at the often-asked question. 

When she gets going, the going gets profound. The winery owner was in a trance, and the deal was sealed. The only sound for a minute or so was that of a single pen scratching the surface of a check for ten barrels of damn good Pinot Noir. 250 cases while it lasts.