Sonoma Coast McDougall Ranch Pinot Noir

Veal, Pork, Poultry, Mushrooms

Jamie Kutch landed a few tonnes of Pinot Noir from McDougall Ranch in 2006. He remembers the phone call vividly, just ahead of harvest. He had been networking sites, cold calling farmers and dropping letters into mailboxes, in the hope of gaining access to Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir. “Finding high end fruit couldn’t have been more difficult due to the impact the movie “Sideways” had on Pinot Noir. I persevered though, as when I first spoke to the McDougalls and they informed me that their vineyard was planted on the high arches of the Sonoma Coast and farmed by Ulises Valdez, I jumped at the opportunity!” Jamie Kutch One of Kutch’s most highly regarded wines, McDougall, originates from grapes perched high on a tranquil mountaintop of Cazadero, just a few kilometres from the Pacific Ocean. The oldest bedrock occurs on steep slopes and high hills and mountains in northern Sonoma County. Called the Franciscan Complex from exposures near San Francisco, it is an eclectic collection of different rock types that date back as far as 150 million years.. Mostly of oceanic origin, the Franciscan Complex includes sea-floor marine sediments along with iron-rich igneous volcanic, plutonic, and metamorphic rocks. These rock types originated far offshore and became mixed together by faulting at a fundamental plate tectonic geologic boundary called a subduction zone, where the ocean floor tectonic plate dives under the continental edge.

100% whole-cluster fermentation, with indigenous yeasts.

Jamie Kutch’s route to winemaking began late. He had graduated in finance and found himself increasingly bored with the rat race of New York trading floor. As he became more and more fixated on wine and the industry, he would chuck it all in and relocate to California, armed with savings, a steadfast determination and unbridled passion to produce Pinot Noir. His inaugural releases came as recently as 2005. After a rocky road, Kutch is today considered one of the leading exponents of Pinot Noir, ever refining and thrilling for wines of refinement, brightness and translucent expression of place.