2023 Aston Estate Pinot Noir

This continues to be a best barrel selection from a handful of blocks on the Estate.  Over time, the center cut of the vineyard consisting of clones 115, 667 and 777 has shown itself to possess the best balance of fruit and tannin on the property.  Once these blocks have been identified, we taste every barrel to make the Estate wine.  With the 2023, it ended up being 60% clone 777, 30% 667 and 10% 115.  The result is a brooding wine featuring all the usual dark berries of the area complemented by sandalwood, pomegranate, nori, sea spray, mint and wild herbs.  It’s an exotic blend as always, something I feel like we fought in the beginning, but is now the character of the site and the region.  We continue the trend of pulling back on ripeness and we see that reflected in the mouthwatering freshness of the wine, a trait absent from the earlier wines.  If anything, it is moving in the direction of how I craft the Rivers-Marie wines without losing any of the wild, savage combinations that make Annapolis so unique.  Vine age has been helping this direction and then when you add the specialness of 2023, hard to do something that doesn’t rival your greatest wines of the past.