Our Trenton Estate Vineyard has long been known for producing some of California’s most age-worthy wines. Joe Swan first planted the vineyard in 1969 to Pinot Noir. Today, Russian River’s oldest Pinot Noir vines continue to thrive here. You may be surprised to learn too, that the Swan clone of Pinot Noir finds its humble beginnings in Joe’s original plantings. As these vines age, many viticultural practices have changed, and winemaking has evolved. Still, the site’s integrity shines through it all. We are truly blessed to make wine from this unique site and look forward to the wines we’ll continue to make for many years to come.

The six-bottle vertical includes the following:

2011 Trenton Estate Pinot Noir

2011 was a cool, late ripening year, resulting in wine with laser beam focus, brilliant acidity and excellent complexity. I was so taken with the wine, I put aside more of it than any wine ever before. I am really glad I did. Seven years in, and it is still tight and youthful but a delight to drink. It will age for many years to come.

2012 Trenton Estate Pinot Noir

Unlike 2011, 2012 was an easy growing season with an abundance of delicious grapes. The vintage was so precocious that I resisted liking it. However, the wines are so utterly delicious, they disproved my early concern about their aging potential. It drinks well today, but the wine also has a wealth of underlying structure for continued evolution.

2013 Trenton Estate Pinot Noir

Our 2018 harvest intern, Delia Sie, who has a background in retailing fine wine, put it best. It was everything she wanted to find in a California Pinot Noir – sunny like California, happy like our cows, unapologetically delicious, yet not without intrigue to keep you wanting more.

2014 Trenton Estate Pinot Noir

It was a year of abundant crop, yet we only bottled a little over 200 cases. Much of the estate fruit became a vital component in our 2014 Cuvée de Trois. On its own, the estate wine is dark for a Pinot, showing off notes of five spice, brambly berries, and the freshness of forest floor. Bracing smooth tannins and near perfect acidity argue for a long life.

2015 Trenton Estate Pinot Noir

In this year, vintage speaks louder than the typicity of the Russian River Valley. Inclement conditions during the flowering season led to a very small crop. The low crop level coupled with a warm summer resulted in an early harvest of intensely rich wines. While Russian River Valley often creates shyer styles of Pinot, our 2015 estate Pinot is luscious and generous.

2016 Trenton Estate Pinot Noir

Consider this a pre-release (it is not yet available for individual purchase)! We fondly think back on the 2016 harvest as one with few obstacles and happy results. After this harvest, we were greeted with a wet winter and dramatic contrasts in subsequent years.This bottle serves as a good bookend for the recent drought affected vintages. As the youngest in the lineup, this wine shows off more playful and fresh-fruited notes that will only deepen over time.

Over time our Pinot Noirs have fallen into a sort of a hierarchy. Saralee’s is usually the prettier, Trenton View is the lightest in color, Great Oak is the most masculine and backward. However the last few years Great Oak has started, probably due to vine age, to be less tannic and backward. Its place in the hierarchy seems to have been taken by Ritchie Vineyard!

Dark red fruit (as opposed to berry) with hints of graphite. Red, almost plum-like. Currently more structured than apparent. With air it shows deeper red fruit and richness emerges.

This wine comes from one of the older blocks of this vineyard. The original plantings were 100% Barrel fermented in French oak, aged sur lies with battonage (lees stirring) once a month. Full malolactic fermentation took place. The wine was aged 10 months in Barrel.

The vineyard is highly coveted with numerous winemakers sourcing from here. Everyone gets their own dedicated row (or half as the case may be). However, not all Ritchie Vineyard wines are created equal. Throw in personal preferences with at least one winery picking 2 weeks ahead of everyone else and a couple wineries on the other end of the spectrum. Leads to some very diverse wines. We fall somewhere in the middle.

Bright lemon yellow color. Ripe pear with lemon custard and a hint of mango. Classic Ritchie profile and aromatics are present. Very rich, very full opulence balanced by good acidity. Long, full fruit. A fine counterpart to its stablemate Kent the Younger.

Over the last decade we have made a number of orange wines. Not from oranges but from grapes! I made my first orange wine the second year I was a winemaker simply out of curiosity. I was dissatisfied with the answers academics gave me for white grapes weren’t turned into wine the same way red wines were in conventional winemaking despite the centuries-long tradition of doing so. I decided to find out for myself what would happen. That first orange wine was made from what were probably the most expensive grapes in the state at the time -- Chardonnay from Winery Lake Vineyard in Carneros. I labeled it Gonzo, after a dear friend’s obsession with the author Hunter S. Thompson and his style of journalism, known as Gonzo journalism.

Years passed and I started hearing about a “new, hip wine” that’s all the rage -- orange wine! It came from rather obscure but widespread winegrowing regions in Europe where white grapes were made with varying amounts of skin contact during fermentation. Some were treated like red wine, but lacking any red pigment they were more orange than light gold or red. Others were made using oxidative winemaking techniques resulting in nutty, dark wines that were more intellectually curious than delicious. Although these wines were long known in Europe, a few wine bars in Manhattan, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities, eager to find something that appealed to new wine drinkers, embraced them. I have long enjoyed the non-oxidative style of making these wines. For this style, Grenache Blanc is my grape of choice.

To share our curiosity with you, we’ve decided to pack a bottle of 2016 Catie’s Corner Grenache Blanc and a bottle of the 2016 Catie’s Corner Grenache Blanc Cuvée Orange together as an educational package. What I would like you to do is to share them. Share them with friends, serve them at Thanksgiving, or whenever else is appropriate. In addition, I am asking you to just serve them with no introductions, no anything until later. You can then tell them that many winemakers generally feel that site trumps everything. Second comes the grape variety or varieties and third comes the winemaker’s hand. Here is an example where the hand of the winemaker takes center stage. The two wines come from the same grapes from the same site but separated at birth. Half go into the press and are whole cluster pressed to juice before fermentation. The other half is partially de-stemmed, then fermented on the skins just like pinot noir. I don’t know about you, but I find this loads of fun! It is sure a lot easier than trying to explain it ahead of time!

Co-fermented with 5% Viognier. Aged for 18 months in neutral French oak barrels.

Racy, vibrant, violet laced fruit reminiscent of French plums and licorice with a bit of kid leather. Amazing brightness to the fruit. Mouthwatering acidity brings you back for just one more sip. The depth of tannins combined with the vibrant acidity argue for a long life.