A Quest Completed
The last time I was in California it was to visit friends, not to tour wine country. We met in Mendocino, a beautiful beach-town and artist's colony in the northern part of the state a couple of hours by car from San Fransisco. If you take the long way (along the coast) it's a much longer, beautiful and somewhat scary trip. It's certainly a tourist town but fun in the off-season. 
While in Mendocino we ate our most fancy dinner at the MacCallum House inn and restaurant. The restaurant has a liberal corkage policy (which means you can bring your own wine) and to save a bit of cash we bought a couple of bottles at the local market. One of those bottles was an Esterlina Pinot Noir. We all thought the wine was wonderful - although it may have been the company and the fact that it was our second bottle. Since that evening I've been looking for another bottle of Esterlina to see what I thought about the wine in more controlled settings.
I failed utterly, until today when UPS delivered.
I had no idea at the time but Esterlina is a small family-owned winery that's located a short distance from Mendocino, in what's called the Anderson Valley. They get some of their grapes from their own local vineyard and some from other areas including the Russian River Valley. These two areas are "appellations" in wine-speak which basically means the grapes taste distinctive due to climate, soil and so on. That, at least, is the claim. Having an appellation generally lets you charge a higher price for your wine. I suspect that many appellations are really just marketing gimmicks. Regardless, the Mendocino area and parts of the Anderson Valley get year-round cool breezes from the coast so it's no suprise that Pinot Noir does well in the area. Because they are small and family-owned Esterlina doesn't distribute their wines nationwide. According to their published history they only decided to sell their wine after a few years of making it for themselves and friends. To give you a better concept of scale, they produced 500 cases of the 2002 Russian River Valley Pinot Noir. This year Yellow Tail of Australia will sell between 8 and 8.5 million cases in the U.S alone.
To be honest it took me a while to even remember the name of the wine we had at dinner that night. Eventually, with some help from image-processing tools, my wife and I deciphered the writing on the label in one of the pictures we took at dinner. Armed with this I searched the local wine stores but didn't find it. Eventually I got the right Google search entered and discovered the Esterlina web site; at the time they didn't ship their wines to Virginia, so I was resigned to never doing my comparison.
Things have changed in the last couple of years. Now almost every winery in California will happily ship to your home in Virginia or the District of Columbia (Maryland, sorry, you're still under strict regulations). All you have to do is pay them full list price for the wine as well as shipping, and if it's really special you should pay for insurance too. Normally the cost involved is enough to prevent me from doing this. In this case I decided to make an exception. On the 25th of last month I placed my order and got my confirmation email the same day, all very professional. The wine arrived 10 days later in good condition.
I decided to try the one that was closest to the mysterious dinner wine in age if not source; the 2002 Esterlina Russian River Valley (Sterling Family Vineyards) Pinot Noir.
Right away I knew that this was the right one. The aroma is powerful, containing hints of apricot and date as well as the distinctive smell of the Pinot grape. The wine has a garnet color (purplish red) with a hint of rust. If you look closely in the glass you'll see a rim of light pink; I'll talk some more about the importance of this in another review. The actual taste is delicious with full fruit, a bit of raisin flavor and a tart finish; not too sweet or overwhelming. There's just enough oak there to give it some character. I really enjoy the wine and I'd have absolutely no problem serving this to company or on a special occassion.
My chief regret is that at $30 plus shipping and handling I can't afford to buy a case of this one and see how it ages. I think it will get better a few years on.
While in Mendocino we ate our most fancy dinner at the MacCallum House inn and restaurant. The restaurant has a liberal corkage policy (which means you can bring your own wine) and to save a bit of cash we bought a couple of bottles at the local market. One of those bottles was an Esterlina Pinot Noir. We all thought the wine was wonderful - although it may have been the company and the fact that it was our second bottle. Since that evening I've been looking for another bottle of Esterlina to see what I thought about the wine in more controlled settings.
I failed utterly, until today when UPS delivered.
I had no idea at the time but Esterlina is a small family-owned winery that's located a short distance from Mendocino, in what's called the Anderson Valley. They get some of their grapes from their own local vineyard and some from other areas including the Russian River Valley. These two areas are "appellations" in wine-speak which basically means the grapes taste distinctive due to climate, soil and so on. That, at least, is the claim. Having an appellation generally lets you charge a higher price for your wine. I suspect that many appellations are really just marketing gimmicks. Regardless, the Mendocino area and parts of the Anderson Valley get year-round cool breezes from the coast so it's no suprise that Pinot Noir does well in the area. Because they are small and family-owned Esterlina doesn't distribute their wines nationwide. According to their published history they only decided to sell their wine after a few years of making it for themselves and friends. To give you a better concept of scale, they produced 500 cases of the 2002 Russian River Valley Pinot Noir. This year Yellow Tail of Australia will sell between 8 and 8.5 million cases in the U.S alone.
To be honest it took me a while to even remember the name of the wine we had at dinner that night. Eventually, with some help from image-processing tools, my wife and I deciphered the writing on the label in one of the pictures we took at dinner. Armed with this I searched the local wine stores but didn't find it. Eventually I got the right Google search entered and discovered the Esterlina web site; at the time they didn't ship their wines to Virginia, so I was resigned to never doing my comparison.
Things have changed in the last couple of years. Now almost every winery in California will happily ship to your home in Virginia or the District of Columbia (Maryland, sorry, you're still under strict regulations). All you have to do is pay them full list price for the wine as well as shipping, and if it's really special you should pay for insurance too. Normally the cost involved is enough to prevent me from doing this. In this case I decided to make an exception. On the 25th of last month I placed my order and got my confirmation email the same day, all very professional. The wine arrived 10 days later in good condition.
I decided to try the one that was closest to the mysterious dinner wine in age if not source; the 2002 Esterlina Russian River Valley (Sterling Family Vineyards) Pinot Noir.
Right away I knew that this was the right one. The aroma is powerful, containing hints of apricot and date as well as the distinctive smell of the Pinot grape. The wine has a garnet color (purplish red) with a hint of rust. If you look closely in the glass you'll see a rim of light pink; I'll talk some more about the importance of this in another review. The actual taste is delicious with full fruit, a bit of raisin flavor and a tart finish; not too sweet or overwhelming. There's just enough oak there to give it some character. I really enjoy the wine and I'd have absolutely no problem serving this to company or on a special occassion.My chief regret is that at $30 plus shipping and handling I can't afford to buy a case of this one and see how it ages. I think it will get better a few years on.
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