2018 Rural Wine Company Pinot Noir Eagle Peak Mendocino 750 ml

We told Rural Wine Co. winemaker Jake Fetzer that we were intrigued that his winery didn’t have a website. He just laughed and pointed to the turnoff to their place: “We don’t even have a sign!”
 
The 2018 Rural Wine Co. Pinot is the epitome of a Wine Access discovery, and it took us a good 100 miles north of Napa—easily the farthest north in California we’d ever trekked for Pinot Noir—just two days after the bottle materialized at HQ (courtesy of an intrepid winemaker friend) and wowed our entire tasting panel. With the finish of the taut, finely-cut Pinot Noir still on our tongues, we’d Googled the winery. Nada. Nothing.
 
That gave us an excuse to trek to the Eagle Peak AVA—where famed vintner Dan Kosta of Kosta Browne recently purchased a vineyard—the source of this exceptional Pinot. Crafted by third-generation members of the area’s founding families, it shows a translucent ruby color and nose of fresh Rainier cherry, raspberry, and strawberry fruit. It blew us away with its flourishes of violets, forest floor, and pink peppercorn, not to mention its crackling energy. 
 
Rural Wine Co. may not have the name of Rhys, Goldeneye, and LIOCO—all of which source from Mendocino County—but it comes from one of the area’s foundational family: Brothers Ben and Jake Fetzer hail from the clan that put Mendocino on the wine map. Long before Mendocino Pinot Noir was fetching $60+ per bottle, the Fetzers were making fine wine in Mendocino County.

The brothers’ grandfather founded the family winery in 1968, but it has been a quarter-century since the family and the Fetzer label went separate ways. Since then, the brothers have channeled their half-century of know-how into other projects, namely Masút, which pioneered Pinot Noir in the Eagle Peak region of Mendocino County.

It was on the strength of the Masút wines that the Eagle Peak AVA was established in 2014. “It’s a high-elevation AVA, from 1,000 to1,600 feet,” Jake told us, gesturing out from the recently renovated winery. “It’s all hillside vineyards, no valleys, and there’s really no vineyards larger than 25 acres, so you have to have these great, small vineyard blocks.”
 
Small is an understatement—the entire AVA has just about 120 planted acres of vines (for reference, Château Margaux has 230 acres). “It’s still one of those frontier regions, and has been since we bought the Masút ranch in the early 90s.”
 
It’s not labeled as such, but 100% of the fruit from the 2018 Rural is hand-harvested from the Masút estate, and the result is a wine that sent us to the far reaches of California’s Pinot country—and was well worth the trip. We’ve made it easy for you: You don’t have to look up the website, or look for the sign. Just claim a few bottles.