2021 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir Ferrington Vineyard Anderson Valley 750 ml

They kicked off the California Pinot craze, they still set the standard today—and no bottle shows their greatness more emphatically than the 2021 Ferrington Vineyard Pinot Noir. 

A rare bottle from an absolutely gorgeous vintage, this is near impossible to find outside the Williams Selyem mailing list. It hails from Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley, and a location as exquisite as the Sonoma sites that Williams Selyem introduced to the world. It will be sure to impress when you pop it for Pinot lovers who thought they’d had it all. 

In 1979, Burt Williams and Ed Selyem alchemized a few tons of grapes they had gotten for free 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 bottle bested more than 2000 others to win top red wine at the 1987 California State Fair.

That same year, demand for Williams Selyem exceeded supply, a milestone that brought them permanently into the world of “cult” wine—long before that term had even been used to describe the class of high-quality wines that thousands of devoted fans anticipate every season. 1987 also marked the debut of the Williams Selyem waitlist, which gave Pinot lovers a reliable—but unbearably slow—way to score wines from Williams Selyem. 

Since 1997, Williams Selyem has tapped Kurt Schoeneman’s Ferrington Vineyard. In fact, before he was a grower, Schoeneman had a wine epiphany over Williams Selyem wine, and it was a cosmic coincidence that the vineyard he ended up purchasing was already contributing to his “light bulb” wine.