San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Exceptional coastal Pinot Noir
Welcome to Wine of the Week, a series in which Chronicle wine critic Esther Mobley recommends a delicious bottle that you should be drinking right now. Last week, she highlighted Bokisch Vineyards’ Verdejo, a Spanish white wine rarely seen in California. Check for a new installment online every Wednesday.
Just from looking at it in my glass, I can tell that the Cep Pinot Noir is the kind of Pinot Noir I’m going to like. Its color is a limpid, rosy magenta, which tells me that the wine is going to be lightweight. For Pinot Noir, that means it veers closer to the floral, botanical end of the flavor spectrum than the dense, candied end. And the wine delivers: It smells like bergamot tea, potting soil and roses, leading into flavors of cranberry and strawberry, framed by gentle tannins and tight acidity.
At $35, the Cep Pinot Noir isn’t exactly a cheap wine by most people’s standards. But it’s an exceptional value for what it is, culled from the same barrels of wine that go into $65 bottles.
Cep is what’s known as a second label, essentially a place for a reputable winery to put some of its wines that don’t quite make the cut for its crème de la crème. In this case, the winery is Peay Vineyards, an estate in Annapolis, in the very northwest corner of Sonoma County.
Since its founding, about 20 years ago, Peay has distinguished itself as one of the top producers from this celebrated segment of the western Sonoma Coast region, whose highelevation ridgelines, coastal proximity and fogshrouded air make it an ideal place to grow coolclimate Pinot Noir. Three family members divide up the work: Vanessa Wong makes the wines, her husband, Nick Peay, tends to the vineyard, and his brother Andy Peay manages the business.
Farming Pinot Noir grapes is always a tricky proposition. The variety is fickle, sensitive to inclement weather and often lowyielding. And growing Pinot in Annapolis, especially the way that Peay does it — organically, without tilling the soil — is inevitably costly, certainly more so than the $35 Cep Pinot Noir would suggest. “You cannot grow that quality on the west Sonoma Coast to sell it at that price point,” Andy Peay says.
What allows the Peay team to charge just $35 for the Cep Pinot Noir is a careful classification of the wines they produce every year. The process is straightforward: Wong makes wine from all of the estate vineyard’s Pinot Noir, then decides afterward which barrels seem worthy of their top line (the $64$66 bottles they call Scallop Shelf, Pomarium and Ama) and which seem worthy of the middle tier (the $45 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir). Whatever’s left over becomes Cep. There’s no set volume — they can end up with 300 cases of Cep some years, 900 in other years.
That might make it sound like Cep is just a bunch of castoff liquid, but trust me, these are the kinds of castoffs you want. It’s partially a question of style. Many California Pinot Noirs that are designed to be $35 are heavy, oaky and, to my palate, sweettasting; that’s just the type of wine that the mass market demands at that price point.
It’s far less common to find a wine at this price, especially in an expensivetofarm region like the Sonoma Coast, that chooses to be lighter and transparent — that crackles with energy and verve, refreshing enough that you’ll keep wanting to take another sip.
The wine is available from the Peay website or at the following San Francisco retailers: Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant, William Cross, Castro Village, Dolores Outpost and BiRite.
Cep Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast 2018 ($35, 13%)