Promise, peril of Sonoma Coast

Nowhere in California has more prestige in Pinot Noir right now than the Sonoma Coast.

For all the shortfalls of this sprawling appellation — it occupies nearly half the county of Sonoma, and is four times as big as the Russian River Valley — it has become a powerful mark on a label. As always with California, the prospect of the coast holds strong allure.

So it has become a new benchmark for Pinot Noir in the state. Especially so with the 2010 vintage, a tough year if ever there was one. Just as with the Russian River Valley wines we tasted recently, 2010

was a bellwether for decisions about style.

The vintage had a one-two punch of hot and cold: cool weather for much of the year, interspersed with a couple of heat spikes that burned a lot of fruit. Being farther out toward the Pacific — closer to what is now sometimes dubbed the “true Sonoma coast” — helped modulate those heat spikes a bit. But rare was the vineyard that wasn’t affected.

I was joined for a lineup of about 40 wines by Alan Murray, a master sommelier and the wine director at Masa’s, and by Jason Lefler of Solano Cellars. We expected that even the best wines might have some uneven aspects, given the changeable weather.

What we didn’t expect was such a wobbly lineup. Many bottles did, indeed, exhibit both slightly unripe, green flavors and raisined ones. That, though, wasn’t as unsettling as some wines’ somewhat unfinished nature — efforts that tasted as though they had endured some unfortunate cosmetic cellar work in a drive toward drinkability. In a few cases, we detected smoky aspects reminiscent of the wildfire-touched 2008 vintage. Could a phantasm of ’08 be lingering in a few bottles?

All these things made the wines especially hard to parse. Some might improve with a few more months in bottle; we waited longer than usual to taste, but maybe these are particularly late to blossom.

Some wines awaiting release later this year certainly have plenty of potential. The big, fecund flavors of the 2010 La Follette Sangiacomo Vineyard ($40, 14.7% alcohol) show a balance of size and style.

As you drift farther toward the fog-draped shoreline, reasons for excitement emerge. The tension and power in Williams Selyem’s bottles from the Hirsch ($75, 14.3%) and rare Precious Mountain ($94, 14.2%) vineyards mark a fine showing for the extreme farming of the coast’s far reaches.

If our current list of selections seems a bit abridged, that’s because I’m withholding final judgment on how the Sonoma Coast fared in 2010. Perhaps it’s one of those vintages that requires an extra stay in bottle. Or it may be, as the Russian River wines were, a tough referendum on the limits of style (sfg.ly/R373UM).

One other thing. At the West of West festival in Occidental earlier this month, a range of 2009s and 2010s from what has come to be diplomatically called the West Sonoma Coast — seeing that grapes in pip-spitting distance from Sonoma Valley can, bureaucratically speaking, be from the Sonoma Coast — were on fine display.

Because geography is the Molotov cocktail of California wine, the Westies are hesitant to push too hard for an official delineation of the proper coast and its subareas (although the federal government approved one such longstanding request, for the Fort Ross-Seaview area north of Jenner, earlier this year). It is a far stretch from the Lakeville area near Carneros to the hills above Bodega Bay. The gusts of the Petaluma Gap should reasonably stand apart from the fog of remote Annapolis to the north.

It’s good to keep discussing geography. But it’s also good to acknowledge that when we talk about this appellation, we are almost necessarily speaking in overly broad terms. Sonoma Coast may now be a familiar sight on the shelf, but that doesn’t mean we’ve begun to understand its true nature.