2018 Dragonette Cellars Pinot Noir Radian Vineyard Sta. Rita Hills Santa Barbara 750 ml

On our revelatory trip to Dragonette Cellars in Santa Barbara County, we fell deeply in love with their 2018 Dragonette Radian Vineyard Pinot Noir. This wine goes almost exclusively to their mailing list, other than a few select restaurants. There will be some sommeliers cursing our name when they receive their limited allocation this year, but the wine was too good not to share with Wine Access members, so we pleaded with owners John Dragonette and Brandon Sparks-Gillis until they gave in.  

The 2016 and 2017 releases were instant critical hits, but this peerless 2018 continues to raise the bar. It received 97 points and an Editors’ Choice selection from Wine Enthusiast, while Jeb Dunnuck called it “another stunner.” 

This is just the latest in a long string of praises for Dragonette Cellars, whose wines rarely hit the open market. We’ve secured an extremely limited allocation of this glorious mailing-list gem but, needless to say, we don't expect it to last long.

The quality of the fruit from Radian Vineyard is so impressive that the owners of Screaming Eagle bought the site in 2015, but Dragonette still farms their original blocks. Pour a glass and you’ll immediately realize why Wine Enthusiast called the 2018 “utterly delicious” and “a head-spinning sip.” 

Tiny, concentrated berries packed with freshness deliver a mesmerizing Pinot with ethereal aromas of juicy black cherry, wild strawberry, allspice, forest floor, and a hint of cedar. Balletic in form, energetic but muscled with power, it spills over with loganberry, mushroom, and integrated baking spice, punctuated by crushed stone minerality. It’s elegant and lithe, with layers of silken tannins, radiant acidity, and a long, complex finish. 

This Pinot is just a baby, and we can’t wait to experience it in 10-15 years.

Ever since tasting a Dragonette Pinot Noir at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York several years ago, we've dreamed of visiting the winery in Santa Barbara County. While the cuisine from Blue Hill’s Chef Dan Barber is indeed the stuff of legend—ranked #12 on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list—the wine still managed to steal the show that night. A couple days after New Years, we finally made the trip south to “one of the most fascinating wineries in the Central Coast,” making “truly world class,” wines—as Vinous founder Antonio Galloni describes Dragonette. We’d go one step further, saying the generosity, precision, and freshness of their wines makes them some of the finest we’ve tasted in recent memory.

When we arrived at the winery we found co-owners and co-winemakers John and Brandon deep in the middle of moving barrels around. The terms “hand-crafted” and “small-production” are bandied about right and left these days, but it isn’t often that you encounter owners personally making the wine and personally doing all the unglamorous cellar work. U2’s “Achtung Baby” was blasting from the speakers—one of our favorite bands—so we didn’t mind waiting until they finished.

By the time we finished the tasting we had convinced the guys to show us the Radian Vineyard, which sits on the former Rancho Salsipuedes (loosely translating to "get out while you can” because of its extreme terroir). Radian’s unreal vineyard-scape of white crushed rocks—ancient Diatomaceous soils that contain large rocks as light as feathers—boasts the same prized qualities as the chalky soils of Champagne or the Albariza soils of Jerez. As Radian’s vines struggle in this challenging, cold, and windy site, they produce tiny clusters of small berries, which yield a perfectly fresh, concentrated wine with a racy brightness—never more so than in 2018’s cool, deliciously-long growing season. This is take-your-breath-away good Pinot Noir.

There are some wines you taste and instantly fall in love with—this is one of those bottles.