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Pisoni Estate 2018 Pinot Noir XX Anniversary
Pisoni Estate 2018 Pinot Noir XX Anniversary
Recently, the Pisoni family celebrated the twentieth vintage of their signature Estate Pinot Noir. Like anything well wrought, distinguished wine requires a great deal of thought and ample time to create. The backstory behind this latest release unfolds in three installments, all of which feature patience, perseverance, and perspective—and some moxie thrown in for good measure.
To understand how the 2018 Pisoni Estate Pinot Noir came into being, cast your glance backward half a century to the seventies, when Gary Pisoni graduated from college.
Though barely out of his teens, Gary had already begun thinking about himself as a vintner. The first stage of his research was particularly pleasant: tasting and collecting wine. Less easy, convincing his father that planting grapevines in the highlands above the farm was a good idea. The first few times Gary raised the subject did not go well.
The family had bought a parcel of land in the Santa Lucia Highlands for a song—scrub land upon which they grazed cattle. Gary knew every inch of this rough ground, having helped his father take care of the cattle. “When I told my dad I wanted to grow grapes up there, he looked at me like I was crazy. In fact, everyone thought I was crazy,” Gary remembers.
Despite this less than encouraging sign, however, Gary did not give up on his dream. Rather, he planted his first grapevines in 1982—when his parents were away on vacation. For close to a decade, Gary hauled water from the family’s vegetable farm on the valley floor up the steep hillsides to irrigate his young vines. To everyone’s surprise, they thrived—and this was well before the Santa Lucia Highlands AVA was even officially established. It wasn’t long before Gary, typically outfitted in a brightly-colored Hawaiian shirt, began driving people through the stunning blocks of the small vineyard, in the Jeep that became his signature vehicle.
The second stage of the long labor that has culminated in the twentieth vintage began in 1998. By this time, Gary had gained a reputation as a maverick farmer and vintner whose grapes were recognized for their high quality. He is famous for handshake grape deals, rather than written contracts (a tradition that still continues today). Gary had a special block of Pinot Noir that he did not want to sell. As harvest neared and so did Gary’s ambition for his own Estate label, the prominent vintner Mark Aubert offered to make the first couple vintages of wine until sons Mark and Jeff returned from school.
In 2001 Jeff graduated with an enology degree from the California State University, Fresno. By the following year, Mark had earned a BS in Agricultural Economics from UC Davis and a MS in Farm Business Management at Cornell. The brothers were fully prepared and committed to farming and making wine with the family.
Fast-forward to arrive at 2018, when this latest release of Pisoni’s Estate Pinot Noir was harvested, and you can see just how much continuity there is in the family’s way of farming. Gary’s parents purchased the ranch upon which their son planted grapevines. In turn, like their father before them, Mark and Jeff craft wine. The 20th vintage of Pisoni Estate Pinot Noir also offers illustration of the flexibility and foresight with which the family works to further agricultural, economic, and community sustainability. In order to maintain a wildlife corridor which helps keep the ecosystem a healthy one, Gary and his sons have planted only 35 of their 280 acres in vines. With the aid of the men and women who have for decades worked alongside him, Mark has increased the focus on sustainability by combining cutting-edge technologies with traditional farming techniques to tend the vines. To conserve water, a pressure chamber and a porometer continuously measure how much moisture each vine receives. Soil probes assess the level of moisture up to five feet below ground, while a Tule system of plant evapotranspiration helps maintain the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum.
Last but not least, the family keeps a beehive (whose honey is as beautiful a color as their Chardonnay) and cultivates an insectary under the careful supervision of Special Projects Manager Jazmin Lopez. Hummingbirds dart through blooms here and butterflies hover as beneficial insects keep pests at bay. At almost two acres, the insectary is one of the largest in the state of California. It is just one of the many ways—if a particularly beautiful example—of the work Gary began in the seventies and which culminates this fall in the 20th vintage of the Pisoni family’s well-wrought Estate Pinot Noir.
