2022 Domaine De La Cote La Cote Pinot Noir

Tasting Notes

The 2022 Domaine De La Côte "La Côte" Pinot Noir from Sta. Rita Hills is a strikingly complex and expressive wine. It opens with vivacious notes of honey and soft red fruits, quickly deepening into earthy layers of bark, green leaves, and tart berries. Aromas of black tea, asphalt, and dense herbs mingle with wild cranberry, creating a bold and herbaceous profile that may polarize palates. The finish is marked by tea-like tannins and a vibrant acidity, hinting at its aging potential. Though intense in youth, with air it reveals a romantic depth and promises a graceful evolution over time.

About Winery

The Sta. Rita Hills are unique among winegrowing places, an austere and somewhat harsh place in which to produce subtle wines from Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, varieties long associated with gentler locales. We lie in the contested space between that vast, frigid, tumultuous sea and an equally expansive, severe, arid desert. We came to this place seeking an antithesis of the preordained richness of new world winelands, where plump and generous wines seemed inevitable, in search of a site that compels vines and people together to struggle in a productive way that can be overcome only by hands and effort, observation, and ingenuity. We sought an incisive place that would scrape away a wine’s uncomplicated flesh to reveal the muscle, bone, and organ that become the contour, nuance, and novelty of wines unique to this place. Finding a place where nature inexorably imposes its aesthetic we hope allows us, through viticultural choices and straightforward winemaking, to discern and clarify its signal.

The process, not just the product, nurtures us. A goal since breaking ground in 2006 was to be able to pose questions to the vineyard, as to an oracle, about elements and earth, about wine, about the nature of life itself. Answers came first as vines that lived and claimed a foothold in the earth and blossomed and grew strong. Then as grapes, small in volume but dense with matter, energy, and potential. And finally as wines, each year more pure and original, more beguiling and eloquent. Each year, the same questions elicit new answers, which we mull over and chew on and drink deeply of, and which ultimately further this story, our story, propelling us exhilaratingly into the new vintage.