2024 Aston Estate Pinot Noir

Every year we cut the Estate vineyard into smaller pieces to see where the greatest quality lies. In the beginning, we addressed the site by clone, picking the 115, 667 and 777 in their respective entireties every vintage for the first 15 years or so. With my acquisition of the project in 2021, we’ve begun drilling into finer details. The last couple mailers, we’ve been talking a lot about the style evolution at Aston, moving more toward what I do at Rivers-Marie. The other big change year over year has been the number of individual ferments we execute at harvest. This increased lot total gives us more flexibility to make better blends and determine not just what’s the best clone, but what are the best sections within each clonal break. For 2024, we discovered what we always thought had been true but had never confirmed, the center cut of the clone 777 hill is where the highest quality sits. We complemented that with small pieces of clone 115 and 667 to achieve the final blend. Even with this level of refinement, there’s still a wildness to this wine that marks its place on the West Sonoma Coast. The texture is always a bit rustic and savory notes of menthol, juniper, lavender and tea leaf dominate the aromatic. There is ample tannin but it’s a rich structure that melds into darker fruit flavors of blueberries and black raspberries supported on the palate by graphite, wet earth and a dense mineral profile. Though we’ve pulled back on the style, the Aston Estate bottling remains its same hearty self but now with more refinement and a bigger acid profile to keep it fresh and lighter on its feet.