Waits-Mast Family Cellars Mariah Vineyard Pinot Noir 2018
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The 2018 Mariah shows a density not typical of the vineyard in other vintages. Dark and brooding on the nose, even the color is more intense. Dark cherry, cola nut, and clove are layered on a medium bodied frame with fine grained tannins. This wine positively sings right out of the bottle, but is sure to continue to develop over the next 5-7 years.
Pair with anything with mushrooms from a chanterelle risotto to a porcini crusted steak.
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Quite flavorful and nicely structured, this well-concentrated wine grown at 2,300 feet in elevation is worth keeping to enjoy how it develops over time. Engaging raspberry, red cherry and redwood aromas are followed by mouthfilling, ripe black fruit flavors on a full body braced by moderate, fine-grained tannins.
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Waits-Mast Family Cellars was founded by Brian Mast and Jennifer Waits in 2005. Before they started making wines they were geeky & passionate wine consumers. Many weekend getaways were spent exploring wineries across California and overseas in France, Switzerland and New Zealand.
By 2000, they started attending the Anderson Valley Pinot Noir Festival and exploring the winemaking scene by sitting in on the event’s technical conference. The Pinot Noir immersion that weekend, along with the warm and welcoming wine community of Anderson Valley, prompted them to make the shift from wine geeks to wine producers.
Their first commercial wine, a 2007 Pinot Noir from Wentzel Vineyard in Anderson Valley, was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle Top 100 Wines issue. The wines are featured on wine lists of some of the top restaurants in the country and have been well-received by the press, with inclusions in the San Francisco Chronicle Top 100 Wines of 2014, Wine & Spirits "Year's Best Pinot Noir", and Wine Enthusiast’s Top 100 Cellar Selections among others. The wines are crafted in San Francisco with the expertise of our winemaker Shalini Sekhar, who was included in the San Francisco Chronicle's 2019 Winemakers to Watch.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
Essentially a northern extension of the Sonoma Coast AVA but part of Mendocino County, Mendocino Ridge is one of the rare appellations defined by elevation only. The Mendocino Ridge AVA is reserved only for vineyards at or above 1,200 feet between the Anderson Valley and Pacific Ocean.