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Wine Details
Price:
$45.00 per bottle
Description:
Cactus Hill is the hardest wine for us to put together each year. We harvest, and vinify separately, five different Pinot clones from the estate: Dijon selections 113, 114, 115, 667 and 777. After 10 months in barrel, we sit down to evaluate each wine and its relative merits. With the 2003s, our order of preference from favorite to least was 667, 777, 115, 113 and 114. Clones 667 and 777 showed great completeness. They could stand alone as individual bottlings. Clone 115 was all muscle and backbone with a dark core of black fruits. Clone 113 shined aromatically and possessed great sweetness and purity on the finish, but was somewhat hollow in the middle. A nice all-round wine, the 114 started strong but faded fast on the finish. Our approach with the 2003 Cactus involved two blending trials. The first trial was to create the heart of the wine by determining the perfect blend of 667 and 777. The second was to discover how much backbone (115) and finishing sweetness (113) our wine needed for completeness. In the end, we went with 40% 667, 40% 777, 15% 115 and 5% 113.
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Varietal Definition
Pinot Noir:
The name is derived from the French words for ‘pine’ and ‘black’ alluding to the varietals' tightly clustered dark purple pine cone shaped bunches of fruit. Pinot Noir grapes are grown around the world, mostly in the cooler regions, but the grape is chiefly associated with the Burgundy region of France. It is widely considered to produce some of the finest wines in the world, but is a difficult variety to cultivate and transform into wine. By volume most Pinot Noir in America is grown in California with Oregon coming in second. Other regions are Washington State and New York.During 2004 and the beginning of 2005, Pinot Noir became considerably more popular amongst consumers in the United States, possibly because of the movie Sideways. Being lighter in style, it has benefited from a trend toward more restrained, less alcoholic wines. It is the delicate, subtle, complex and elegant nature of this wine that encourages growers and winemakers to cultivate this difficult grape. Robert Parker has described Pinot Noir: "When it's great, Pinot Noir produces the most complex, hedonistic, and remarkably thrilling red wine in the world."
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