2018 LIOCO Pinot Noir Mendocino County 750 ml

Wine Access members have been snapping up LIOCO’s dazzling Northern California Chardonnays for years at a blinding pace. This racy 2018 Mendocino County Pinot Noir is a new release long-awaited both by us and a cohort of elite Bay Area sommeliers. Today is the first time we’re offering it, and scarcity will pose a real issue—especially at $24 per bottle!

We have just 50 cases of this wine, in only the second vintage it’s been released. The first, 2017, was a kind of pilot test, with 1,000 cases made that were almost completely bought up by Michelin-starred restaurant clients like Rich Table and State Bird Provisions. It was a huge hit: floral, juicy, and clean, the kind of stuff you want to just keep pouring.

Producer Matt Licklider upped the volume in 2018, but still saw the vast majority go to by-the-glass placements on top wine lists. Times being what they are, allocations eased a little—enough to get our foot in the door with this new release and put bottles into the hands of at least a few Wine Access members.

Vibrant, energetic, and lively, opening to pretty, lifted aromatics of crushed berries and plum, this is true Bourgogne Rouge bistro-style Pinot that is an absolute delight on the dinner table (hence why the somms buy it like kids in a candy store).

And unless you’re heading out for a Michelin-starred reservation anytime soon, today is a rare opportunity for you to pick up this light-footed, terrifically elegant Pinot beauty for just $24.

“Keep dreaming.” 

That was how LIOCO proprietors Matt & Sara Licklider responded to the barrage of requests they were receiving from restaurant clients for a Northern California Pinot Noir in the same price bracket as his wildly popular Sonoma Chardonnay. 

“We kept saying no,” Matt told us. “I didn’t think that wine could be made in this day and age.” A discovery changed his mind, however: a new variable that led him to crack the code on beautifully made Pinot from the region for less than $25. That discovery was Potter Valley, an AVA in the northern reaches of Mendocino. A surprisingly cold climate in this interior region fosters the cultivation of thin-skinned grapes like Pinot and Riesling, and infuses the wines with a much different character than the fleshier, broad-shouldered Sonoma Pinots grown where heavier clay soils dominate.

Here the dense clay soils strewn with fist-sized stones provide a juicy, red-fruitedness that marries well with the finer, more savory edge of the Anderson Valley components. Most importantly, because Potter Valley was a little off the beaten path, Matt was able to acquire organically grown grapes at a third of what they would cost in Anderson Valley or Sonoma Coast. “The Potter Valley discovery, as we call it, was the key that unlocked it,” Matt says.

The 2018 is half Anderson Valley grapes, half Potter Valley, from a selection of premier vineyards. Chilled to 55 degrees, it delivers the perfect afternoon sipper at an under-$25 price we once thought we were unlikely to see. If you get to the buy button first, go big.