2016 Rivers-Marie Summa Vineyard Pinot Noir

It’s nice to have a reasonable quantity of this wine again.  With increased vine age, the regular Summa has taken on increased seriousness over the past few vintages.  As the block creeps up on twenty years of age, it grows closer in character to the Old Vines bottling.  It still is a bit deeper than that wine but it has become less linear and more broad at release.  It may still not have the ethereal character of its sibling bottling but everything else is there: red/orange fruit, forest floor, clove, cut hay and sandalwood.  Given the extreme location of this site, the fruit always has the thickest skins of all the vineyards we work with.  The structure here is definitely a direct result of this site condition.  This, like the Old Vines, sees more oak than the other single vineyard wines to help round out some of its youthful, angular nature.  The crop level in 2016 allowed us to hang the block out a little longer then we could in 2015 producing what might be the most complete wine in the lineup.