2017 RAEN Pinot Noir Home Field Fort Ross-Seaview 750 ml

Carlo Mondavi cracked open a beer and handed it to us. It was four in the morning and we were camped out in the inky blackness on the edge of the Home Field Vineyard, two miles inland from the roaring Pacific Ocean. Carlo and the team had just finished picking the 4.8 acre vineyard—the source of today’s sensational, 96-point 2017 RAEN Pinot Noir, as fantastically layered and pure as it is vanishingly rare. 

By the time we’d reached the bottom of our can of Modelo Especial, we made sure we had secured Wine Access's tiny allocation of today's extraordinary release before the grapes were even pressed. We’ve tasted every RAEN release from the Home Field Vineyard, and the wine is that good. Follow our lead and seize the opportunity while it lasts to nab the only bottling off Home Field Vineyard, which barely produces a ton an acre—gorgeously poised Pinot Noir, dark muscular fruit wreathed in violets and forest floor notes. 

Sipping the bottled wine months later with Carlo, we wondered aloud how he and his brother Dante manage to coax so much from such a forbidding site. It all comes down to history: “My family has been farming and making wine since 1919,” he told us. “During Prohibition, we saw where the great grapes were coming from, and we’ve been farming and making Pinot Noir since 1933.”  

We sat down with winemaker Carlo Mondavi to talk about RAEN. Watch the video here.

The Home Field Vineyard is so far from civilization, we could practically see the curvature of the Earth bending across the brilliant starry night sky during our camping trip. It’s that stunning isolation that led Carlo—heir to the iconic Mondavi name and pedigree, along with his brother Dante—to begin the annual ritual of camping out here one night during Home Field’s harvest.

It’s that isolation as well that grants this Pinot Noir an incredible coastal elegance that can’t be replicated anywhere else. “Impressive freshness and purity of fruit here, making for an enticing young pinot with an air of grace and great potential,” declared James Suckling in his 96-point paean to this single-vineyard release. “The rhythm and depth here are magnificent. Superb.” Antonio Galloni flipped over its “tremendous energy and overall intensity, not to mention tons of personality.” 

With RAEN's wines in hot demand at spots like The French Laundry and Eleven Madison Park, supply of this single-vineyard designate is extremely limited. “Just 4.8 acres for the world for the rest of the year,” Carlo says. “You’ll never find any more than that.” We only managed to score a few coveted cases thanks to our friendship with Carlo and willingness to camp. $95 at the winery. In one of the best deals available.

Picking up the mantle of their iconic family legacy, Carlo and Dante started RAEN with the intention of bottling wild Sonoma Coast sites in as pure a fashion as they could. A site like Home Field Vineyard is typically lashed by storms and extreme weather off the Pacific. But because the site is at 1,500 feet of elevation, these few acres of vines are bathed in sunlight while surrounding areas are submerged in fog.

That sunlight provides the brilliant photosynthetic energy to mature and ripen the fruit, filling out the palate with blackberry, black cherry, and blueberry. Contributing as well to the lithe gracefulness of RAEN’s Home Field Pinots are the rocky, marine-derived soils here. “It’s the most soil-diverse site we work with,” Carlo says. Roots spider through layers of ancient ocean bedrock, gravel quartz, and millennia-old Goldridge soils, all helping to produce this wine’s beautiful, lifted perfume.

As the critics and top sommeliers attest, Carlo and Dante are truly making some of the most exciting Pinot Noir coming out of Sonoma today. Don’t miss this shot at one of their most alluring releases yet.