2013 Robert Stemmler Winery Pinot Noir Estate Grown Sonoma Coast 750 ml

2013 Stemmler Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast: “Cut of Grand Cru Cloth”

Anne Moller-Racke

Anne Moller-Racke has been on an unprecedented roll. If you’re a Pinot Noir collector with a penchant for dropping $1,000 per case on Pinots from Kistler, Kosta Browne, Luc Morlet, and Peter Michael, you know about Donum Estate. For three consecutive vintages, Wine Spectator dropped 96-point reviews on the brilliant German-born winegrower’s “East Slope” and “West Slope.”

Not surprisingly, Moller-Racke’s Robert Stemmler Pinot Noirs have proven equally compelling for WineAccess bargain-hunters, earning 135 perfect 5-star ratings in the last three years. As Anne told us again last week as we tasted this lavish 2013 Sonoma Coast gem: “I think of ‘East Slope’ and ‘West Slope’ as my Grand Crus. The Robert Stemmler Pinots are my villages.”

The metaphor is appropriate. The Donum Estate Pinots are deep, dark, rich, and brooding, known for their breadth and bombast and, in great vintages like 2013, they are best consumed 5-8 years after bottling. The Robert Stemmler Pinot Noirs make no such claim. Juicier and flashier on release, Moller-Racke’s “villages” are typically designed for early drinking.

But in the superb 2013 growing season in which drought conditions again prevailed, tiny-berry clusters were loaded with sugar even as acids remained firm. The just-released Robert Stemmler Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir is cut of Donum Estate cloth, mimicking the depth and wild-berry concentration of the superb 2012s.

The 2013 growing season won’t soon be forgotten on Sonoma Coast. The fruit set was large for the second year in a row, a welcome change from the tiny-yield vintages of 2010 and 2011. Little rain fell during the growing season, but most importantly, daytime highs remained mild, rarely creeping into the mid-80s. Nights were cool, leading to a dramatic diurnal temperature shift that accounted for the small-berry clusters. Moller-Racke called it “a near perfect harvest” on the coast, making for one of the finest Pinot Noir lineups of her brilliant, high-scoring career.

The 2013 Robert Stemmler Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast is brilliant deep-ruby. Big and bold aromatically, infused with lavish aromas of black raspberry, black cherry, and sweet spices. Marvelously opulent and intensely concentrated on the attack, broad and brooding yet still high-toned and perfectly light on its feet, the core is filled with crushed wild-berry preserves, finishing with great tension and persistence. Drink now — if you can’t help yourself — or lay down this awfully SERIOUS “villages” until 2020 and beyond.

$21/bottle — the BEST price in America — today on WineAccess. Shipping included on 6.