TN: 2005 Arcadian Pinot Noir Pisoni Vineyard

• 2005 Arcadian Pinot Noir Pisoni Vineyard - USA, California, Central Coast, Santa Lucia Highlands (9/16/2013)
  Popped and poured to accompany baked trout. Darker ruby. Nose of cinnamon, musk, iodine, black raspberry, and mountain florals filling the nostrils with lift and perfume. Concentrated dark fruit on the palate with anise, brambles, smoke, and licorice somehow contributing to a delicious, integrated whole. Surprisingly primary fruit in abundance with refreshing acidity and stern but fine-grained tannins. Dusty but ringing finish of scorched red berry and mineral. Whooha. Somebody knew what they were doing with this wine. From a 375. (93 pts.)

Posted from CellarTracker

I believe that this is the finest Arcadian Pisoni ever produced.
Maybe the finest Pisoni ever produced…

TTT

IIRC from meeting with Joe Davis last year, this was his opinion also.

It is amazing how different Joe’s Pisoni is from the rest of the crowd. The '02 ain’t too shabby either.

I would put the 97 and 02 at the top of the list, but haven’t uncorked any of my 05s thus far. 2000 isn’t shabby either.

Quite a vineyard. Quite a producer.

Cheers,
Doug

I don’t understand how you guys can keep your hands off of these. Such great wines!

Because, unlike most CA Pinots, they develop spectacular secondary and tertiary noses and flavors…
Let them sleeeeeeep…

TTT

Frankly, the first time I had an Arcadian Pisoni, it stunned me. And it really challenged what I thought I had understood about vineyards, terroir and ripeness.

Obviously, you can pick earlier or later from any given vineyard and get different kinds of wines with different Brix and alcohol levels and different ripeness profiles. But until I tasted Arcadian Pisoni, I didn’t realize that you could have such extremes of style from one site. Almost every other Pisoni vineyard and Santa Lucia Highlands pinot I had ever had before was dark, rich, very ripe, lower acid and lush in style. Not bad, just very much in the big modern style.

What I would have previously believed is that this is what kind of wine you need to make from those sites (within a small range), and if you want to make a lighter, higher acid, more delicate and complex pinot, you’d need a cooler site where you could get that style while still leaving the grapes on the vine long enough to mature properly. But Joe Davis had gotten that result, and spectacularly so, from a vineyard whose hallmark is otherwise big, dark, ripe and lush.

I guess, in a way, it made me think that the role of the winemaker is greater than the role of the site and clonal selection, relative to what I had thought before.

That’s all painting with a broad brush, and what I’m talking about is in a matter of degrees, not all-or-nothing, but it really was a head-turning moment for me as a wine lover.

Without a doubt, I second these sentiments. I drank my 12 bottles Years ago…The second most foolish thing I did when I was 24.

Is 2001 your Wedding Anniversary by any chance?

TTT

+1. This was my impression of Pisoni vineyard pinots before and after tasting with Joe. I had not bought a pinot made from this vineyard (or the SLH) for several years because of my impression/prior experiences.

I love this wine. But it still needs lots of time to show all it has to offer.

It baffles me that one can simply “walk on” to this mailing list right now. Totally befuddled. Seriously, why aren’t more people on board here?

plus the 05 pisoni is still available to GCS members if anyone feels like reloading!

Great question. All I can figure is that Joe doesn’t make wines to drink on release and folks are not willing to give them the minimum 7-8 years from vintage they need to start showing their best. No waiting list for Copain either. Go figure.

I am puzzled as well, though of course it was my good fortune a year or two ago to be able to jump right in. Even more surprising is that they sometimes discount library wines, and sometimes steeply. I don’t think there is a pinot/chard producer in the state offering better value right now than Arcadian.

The interesting question is why? My wild guess is that, from my observation on WB and in tasting groups and all, wine enthusiast types tend to undervalue Santa Barbara area pinot. Sea Smoke has had great success, though they’ve become one of those “it’s cool to hate them” wineries among elite geeks, but overall I don’t sense that the area gets much love from wine types. I think wineries like Au Bon Climat, Sanford, Ampelos, d’Alfonso Curran, Alma Rosa and others in that area produce wines that might get a lot more love if they were from the Sonoma Coast, SCM or RRV?

Blake Brown is a Berserker who had a great eye for the good Santa Barbara wines, and he intrepidly tastes and posts here, but you can see that there isn’t much response to his excellent tasting notes.

Oh well, good news for those of us who appreciate the wines from that area, at least.

Thanks everyone for the support of Arcadian and what I do. I am deeply grateful and thankful for the opportunity to push boundaries on occasion and to walk my own path.

I love the whole portfolio. I’ve never joined because Joe comes to Chattanooga!

Well speaking for myself and after reading this note I am requesting a bottle or two of this to be sent with my October shipment

I last had this in April and ranked it up there with some of the top domestic pinots I’ve had. Not cheap, but this one was worth every penny. Joe is, in my mind, the most overacheiving and underrated producer of Pinot in the US. I know some of us on WB, and previously eRP, have been singing his praises for years, but for whatever reason Arcadian hasn’t caught fire. Unfortunate. Joe deserves better.