Occidental - Freestone Occidental - Pinot Noir 2019
Occidental is located in the town of Bodega, in Sonoma, California. It belongs to Steve Kistler, from the well-known Kistler Vineyards. Steve Kistler started to develop a passion for the wines from coastal vineyards during his career at Ridge. In 1995, along with Warren Dutton, he planted 1.5 hectares of Pinot Noir on Taylor Lane and named it Occidental Vineyard. In 1999, he purchased the 40-hectare Bodega Headlands property where he planted 8 hectares of Pinot Noir in 2001. Following several purchases and plantings of Pinot Noir, he founded Occidental in 2011, the new Kistler family winery dedicated to the production of Pinot Noir from the Freestone-Occidental area. The team is still composed of the same people that have worked with Steve for over thirty years.
The Occidental wines are produced from vineyards on a southwest-facing ridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean, just outside the town of Bodega. This ridge and the surrounding headlands mark the western edge of the Freestone-Occidental area and are among the coldest and latest ripening sites where pinot noir is grown in western Sonoma. All fruit is harvested at night and arrives cool at the winery the next morning. The fruit is carefully sorted as clusters before destemming and then as individual berries a second time with the goal of leaving the maximum number of uncrushed whole berries in each fermenter. Each vineyard block is fermented separately to capture as much individual site character as possible. The fruit is not intentionally cold soaked prior to fermentation. The ambient temperature in the fermentation rooms allows the fruit to warm gradually; this activates the native yeasts, the fermentation begins in 7 to 9 days and is complete in less than three weeks. Punch downs are used only as needed to distribute the heat of fermentation, ensuring a gentle extraction. After fermentation is complete, the tanks are drained and only the free-run wine is transferred by gravity to Francois Freres barrels (25% new) to age in a naturally cold underground cellar. Native malolactic fermentations usually begin by the end of December and are complete by late spring of the following year. The wine remains unracked until November when it is moved directly to bottling tank and bottled unfined and unfiltered with a minimum level of SO2.
Grape variety: 100% Pinot Noir