2018 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir Russian River Valley 750 ml

Some wineries can claim to have “started it all,” and some can claim to set the standard today. 

Williams Selyem can do both. Their early vintages clued the world in to the glory of Golden State Pinot Noir. Twenty-five years after their debut, Williams Selyem earned 100 points from Wine Enthusiast, becoming the first North American Pinot to earn a perfect score from a major publication. 

Now Williams Selyem is among the most iconic wineries west of the Mayacamas Mountains, and their Sonoma County, Russian River, and single-vineyard Pinot Noirs are hotly anticipated not just by their endless waiting list, but by collectors around the world. We’re thrilled and honored to help Wine Access members avoid that wait with our allocation of six Williams Selyem Pinots from the flawless 2018 vintage, coming directly from the winery. 

From four prestigious Russian River vineyards, this one shows the heady aromatics that are beloved in Russian River Pinot, carried on a round but well-balanced palate. The acidity keeps this wine fresh on the tongue.

In 1979, Burt Williams and Ed Selyem alchemized a few tons of free grapes into their first wine. Their first vintage under the Williams Selyem name came in 1984, and a year later they introduced the world to their very first single-vineyard Pinot, from the Rochioli Vineyard in Russian River Valley. That wine bested more than 2,000 others to win top red wine at the 1987 California State Fair.

That same year, the demand for Williams Selyem exceeded the supply, a milestone that brought the winery permanently into the world of “cult” wine—long before that term was used to describe the class of high-quality, never-enough-supply wines that thousands of devoted fans anticipate every season. 1987 also marked the debut of the Williams Selyem wait list, which gave Pinot lovers a reliable (but unbearably slow) way to score wines from Williams Selyem. A wait of two or three years is customary. 

One of our old-time collector friends has a knack for getting in on the ground floor of some of California’s top wineries, and he’s poured us early vintages of Arietta, Kosta Browne, even Diamond Creek. But one of the greatest dinners of our lives came the night he tapped into his Williams Selyem collection.   

That night we tasted a dozen Williams Selyem Pinots dating from 2005 back to 1989, when the winery was a (relative) upstart. Every single wine was awash in gorgeous California red berry fruit, and each one on our journey back through the years revealed a little more fruit complexity, a little more forest floor and mushroom—and a little more disbelief that what was in our glasses wasn’t a perfectly cellared Burgundy of the highest order. 

We’re absolutely thrilled to bring you our first-ever allocation from Williams Selyem. It’s your chance to skip the wait list and stock your cellar with the kind of Pinot Noir that will yield rich rewards, whether you open it the day it arrives or decades from now.