Attn Lovers of
DuMOL, Kistler, Littorai, RAEN:
Buckle Up. You Will Be Blown Away.

Dear Artisans,

I need admit how badly I misjudged this one.

When they came by to pour me the lineup, I was a little jaded about it. Single-vineyard Sonoma Coast Pinot and Chardonnay is not exactly an underserved category right now. We've already got our legends.

A new label seems to turn up every few months with 14 bottlings and a map — and diligently tasting through all of them is tiring work (Don't laugh! It really is! I have to remember every detail and difference across 14+ wines...) Especially when the winemaking takes over the terroir, and there's not much of a difference between them.

Or, maybe it was the totally millennial aesthetic fonts and colors. I'd like to believe I can "see through" that.

Commence the humbling. GOOD LORD. Every. Single. Wine. Was incredible!!

The closest thing I can offer as a description is that these taste like DuMOL and Littorai had a baby. Expressive and luscious, then crisp and salty, then dark and bright, all inside the same glass. That is not how this normally goes. Coastal Pinot is hard enough that most people who do it well have to pick a lane and commit to it — you get the rich one or you get the taut one, and the trade-off is the whole point. I do not entirely understand how these are giving you both at once. I have stopped needing to understand it.

The two behind it are Baron Ziegler and Rob Fischer. Baron founded Banshee in 2009 with a couple of friends, watched it become the kind of brand people had tattooed on themselves, and sold it to Foley in 2017 at roughly seventy-five thousand cases. Rob is a Napa native who started at Domaine Carneros and has made something like thirty different varieties in twenty years before deciding cool-climate Pinot and Chardonnay were the only things he wanted to do. Between them they have five daughters — which explains a great deal about the work ethic.

These "kids" (which is absurd; they are middle-aged millennials like me) have simply skipped the part where a second act takes fifteen years — and gone straight to making wines that belong on a shelf with Kistler and Cobb and RAEN. Not instead of them. Beside them, with no redundancy at all.

These are made in lots of one hundred to two hundred cases. Not a marketing number. That is the entire existence of each wine, worldwide, forever. Out of that, we have two dozen bottles of each to put in front of you today.

Seventy-two bottles is not going to pay anybody's rent around here. It is going to make a small number of people extremely happy, which on most days is the better outcome anyway.

Dutton-Jentoft Vineyard Pinot Noir 2022

Here is the detail that made me sit up. Marine Layer splits Dutton-Jentoft with DuMOL. Same hill, same rows, planted in 2007. If you have been buying DuMOL for years, you already know this fruit — you have simply never tasted what a different hand does with it.

The site is a steep hill in Green Valley at about six hundred feet, and the soil situation is almost comical — eight to ten inches of Goldridge sitting on solid sandstone bedrock, and then the roots are on their own. Deep fog, a long slow season, and vines with nowhere easy to go. For 2022 they used 100 percent Swan clone rather than the usual Swan and Calera blend, which is a confident thing to do and it shows. Picked before dawn on the last day of August, native ferment, sixteen days on skins, eleven months in French oak.

Cypress, pomegranate, autumn spice. Amarena cherry and blood orange rind with black tea underneath, refined tannin, and a finish that keeps unspooling. It is dark and lifted simultaneously, which brings us back to the thing I cannot explain.

Durell Vineyard Chardonnay 2023

Durell is one of the handful of California vineyard names that functions as a promise on a label. Kistler works here. Three Sticks works here. Planted in 1979, sandy loam up in the hills and old stony riverbed on the flats, and cooled from two directions at once by the Pacific and San Francisco Bay.

This comes off the bullseye block of Old Wente planted in the late eighties. Hand-picked at night in mid-September, whole clusters straight to press, settled overnight, then native fermentation in barrel with 30 percent new French oak puncheon, full malolactic, lees stirred gently through the spring, eleven months, bottled unfined. Rob's whole approach here is to pick early and get out of the way — which is the only reason a wine this rich still tastes fresh.

Just-ripe pear, baked green apple, apricot, sage, dried flowers, a little honey. Broad shoulders and real phenolic grip, with baking spice on a long finish. If your Chardonnay taste runs to Kistler and DuMOL, this lands squarely in the family and still says something of its own.

"Carina" Rose 2025

This is the best rose I have tasted in years, and I am not going to hedge that.

Salty. Silky. Ethereal. Transcendental. I am aware those are four words people throw at rose when they have nothing to say, and I am using all four on purpose, because this wine is genuinely all of them at once. Most American rose is either a fruit drink or an apology for being pink. This is neither. It has structure, it has a saline grip on the finish — and it disappears from the glass in a way that should probably concern me.

Pinot Noir from their own vineyard in the Sebastopol Hills with Grenache from the southern end of the Sonoma Coast, both picked by hand at night, both pressed as whole clusters straight off the truck, fermented very cool for ten to twelve days, then rested in steel drums and neutral French oak. Named for Carina, the constellation that forms the hull of the ship Argo — which, given how fast a bottle vanishes, feels about right.

Cherry blossom and wild strawberry, watermelon rind, white nectarine, pink apple, and a stony edge holding the whole thing upright. And apparently I am not the only one who noticed.

I was wrong about these.
Happily, loudly wrong.

Take the Pinot if you own DuMOL and want to see the other half of that hill. Take the Chardonnay if Durell means something to you. Take the rose because it is the best one I have had in years and it costs thirty-three ninety-nine. Take all three if you want the argument I have been making for the last thousand words in a single night. Twenty-four bottles of each, on the floor now.

Cheers,

— James Tran

24 bottles of each · call 650-917-8080, text 650-880-3553, or chat with us