2023 Chad Pinot Noir Russian River Valley 750 ml

There’s an advantage to being last to bet at the poker table. But an expert player can influence gameplay from the first position too.

While others waited for answers on this suspenseful vintage in NoCal, Chad took action, moving aggressively to lock in fruit before prices hardened.

“2023 in Sonoma was a right-brain vintage,” Chad told us over the phone. “You couldn’t play it safe and paint by the numbers. To make the best wines took instincts, intuition—and guts.”

Throughout the growing season, Chad had been bouncing around vineyards, tasting grapes and quizzing vineyard managers. Following the twists and turns was like trying to puzzle through Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow. First there’d been rain—a record 55 inches. Then came a cold spring, followed by the latest budbreak in years.

By September, winemakers were mystified. Brix levels were slowing—but physiological maturity was on a run! To know when to pick, winemakers had to trust flavor development and the grapes in their mouth, and ignore lower-than-normal Brix numbers that could be a false signal.

The source estate is the stuff of Sonoma legend: It’s been tapped by Kistler, DuMOL, and Kosta Browne for its Pinot of fine-grained elegance—the product of its loamy, Goldridge soils and low-yielding vines. But this is Chad we’re talking about—the smoothest talker we’ve ever seen in a cellar—and so today, you won’t pay the $60+ this site regularly commands in the open market. It’s a stunning value for a wine that wears its Russian River Valley pedigree on its sleeve and provides non-stop pleasure from the moment the cork is pulled.

Chad bet that the Sonoma growers behind today’s wine had it cracked–and he was right.