Robert Sinskey Vineyards

The Perfect Circle Pinot Noirs

Every vineyard and every growing season creates a wine with a personality born of the elements. Of all grape varieties, Pinot Noir is a particularly impressionable and expressive variety whose character is sculpted by heat summation, modified by weather anomalies and defined by timing to make Pinot Noir the ideal conduit for channeling the essence of vineyard and vintage into a bottle. RSV’s Perfect Circle Pinot Noirs are a culmination of over twenty-five years of working with the rhythms of nature, learning the eccentricities of the grape and discovering how the two interact with place.

Three Amigos Vineyard
Influenced by its proximity to the San Pablo Bay, the Three Amigos Vineyard is one of RSV’s coolest vineyards. As a result, its wines harbor a bright, zingy, berry-fruit character of raspberries and cranberries. It is not a simple, one trick pony. This vineyard, planted by RSV over 28 years ago with heirloom selections and French clones, creates a wine with layers of complexity that many consider to be the most expressive Pinot Noir produced by RSV.

Pure Pleasure

Wine and cheese are both born of fermentation—a technique devised by the ancients to preserve their fresh foods. Good artisan cheese reflects a sense of place in the same way as a carefully grown wine. Some only reveal facets of their true character and achieve greater complexity as they age. It is no cliché that cheese and wine are meant for one another. Presented together simply, or more elaborately, they are pure pleasure!

The Perfect Circle Pinots are far too good to waste so, after the big plates are cleared, a little cheese with the last few drops makes everything come out even. Personally, I’d rather have cheese than dessert and, once I’ve spied the cheese cart in a restaurant, I would almost prefer to skip courses and feast solely on cheese.

Whether I serve cheese in place of, before, or after a meal, it is an important part of our wine culture and our lives. Life is too short to drink bad wine and eat bad cheese.

Until the next wine…
— Maria

EAT:  Putting Together Wine & Cheese

If anything worth doing is challenging, then the 2008 vintage was particularly worthwhile. The reservoirs on the vineyards filled up a bit more than the previous winter, but 2008 was the second year of drought. Then came the frosts. Debby Zygielbaum, vineyard manager, lost a lot of sleep to frost alarms in the wee hours. Debby and her crew’s efforts minimized the damage, but some crop was lost. Drought and frost contributed to low yields, the sort that make the accountant nervous, though nature makes recompense with high quality and concentration.

Though wildfires raged up and down the North Coast, tainting some California wine regions, RSV’s Carneros Vineyards were never at risk. Onshore winds from the San Pablo Bay pushed the threat of smoke taint out of the area; however it did filter the light a bit and made for slower sugar development in the crop - but that’s a good thing. The fires died down about mid-summer and July and early August were unusually mild, allowing for evenly paced fruit development. The heat arrived in the latter half of August, pushing sugars aggressively, but then it quickly subsided, allowing for a relatively slow paced harvest of fruit with beautiful balance of sugars, ripe tannins and acidity. Small clusters, tiny berries and commensurately high skin-to-juice ratios produced intense and concentrated wines.

Jeff Virnig, RSV’s winemaker for over two decades, said tannin management was foremost on his mind, so the cellar crew de-stemmed the bunches and left the rollers open wide on the crusher to encourage a good population of whole berries in the tanks. These whole berries extend the fermentation process, aerate the ferment, minimize harsh tannins, and emphasize berry character. Pressed off after fermentation, the wine rested in 40% new French oak barrels for about 11 months before bottling.