Westwood Winery Sonoma County Pinot Noir 2017
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Tasting
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Jeb
Dunnuck -
Wine
Enthusiast
Product Details
Your Rating
Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
The wine shows sultry aromas of lavender and crushed rose petals. Flavors are filled with strawberry, raspberry and candied orange. The mouthfeel is generous and the finish is full and balanced with bright, seamless acidity.
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
Lilacs, plum, and wet earth are just the first aromatics to grace the nose of this luxe red, whose palate is equally perfumed and charged with flavor, from molasses and wild cherry to savory mushroom. The texture is fleshy, and the finish sparks with black pepper, cedar, and sassafras.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2017 Pinot Noir Sonoma County should represent a terrific value (I wasn’t able to get a price for this release) and it has a classic, balanced style as well as complex notes of black raspberries, spice, and smoky earth. As with everything from this estate, it’s beautifully balanced, with undeniable elegance and a great finish. I suspect it will keep for a decade.
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Wine Enthusiast
This is a bold, hugely concentrated wine, jammy in up-front notions of black cherry and baked strawberry. With firm silky tannins that add weight and structure, it shows its oak, letting it settle to reveal appealing accents of dried herb and Asian spice.
Organic, Biodynamic, Sustainable
Beginning with the cleanest organic and sustainably farmed grapes coupled with the best winemakers in the world, wielding the best equipment available, Westwood wines are meant to elevate the important moments in your life. Expressive, elegant and textured, the wines are unmistakably California, but are crafted for those who appreciate an elevated experience. Reflecting two decades of work and planning, Westwood’s voice is decidedly unique - as unique as their 33 acres in Annadal Gap, Sonoma.
Westwood is a truly unique site, located in the northern end of the Sonoma Valley. The climate is on the cooler side, with the vines covered in fog of the morning, bathed in sun early afternoon, then cooled by the westerly winds off the Pacific Ocean during the afternoon. Endowed with a diverse soil composition, Westwood is able to grow a wide variety of Pinot, Syrah and Grenache clones and other rare varietals not often seen in this region. In 2014 the Estate became biodynamically certified, to preserve the health and longevity of this special site for generations ahead.
Westwood formally teamed up with Philippe Melka and Maayan Koschitzky of Atelier Melka in 2017, world-renowned winemakers and producers of many “100-point” wines. Philippe Melka was born, educated and trained in Bordeaux and was named by the Wine Advocate as “one of the Top 10 Winemakers in the World”. On seeing our Annadel Gap vineyard, Philippe exclaimed, “Westwood has already been gaining great acclaim and attention for award-winning wines from this unique and unexpected gem of a vineyard. Looking ahead, we’re excited to unlock the soul of this special site and take the wines even higher”.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
Home to a diverse array of smaller AVAs with varied microclimates and soil types, Sonoma County has something for every wine lover. Physically twice as large as Napa Valley, the region only produces about half the amount of wine but boasts both tremendous quality and variety. With its laid-back atmosphere and down-to-earth attitude, the wineries of Sonoma are appreciated by wine tourists for their friendliness and approachability. The entire county intends to become a 100% sustainable winegrowing region by 2019.
Sonoma County wines are produced with carefully selected grape varieties to reflect the best attributes of their sites—Dry Creek Valley’s consistent sunshine is ideal for Zinfandel, while the warm Alexander Valley is responsible for rich, voluptuous red wines like Cabernet Sauvignon. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are important throughout the county, most notably in the cooler AVAs of Russian River, Sonoma Coast and Carneros. Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot and Syrah have also found a firm footing here.