2022 Pinot Noir Platt

Rivers-Marie fans will find plenty to like in these new releases. The Pinots are absolutely brilliant. I found the Chardonnays quite a bit more subdued, which is typical of the year, although recent bottling may also explain how the wines show. Sadly, yields are down 30-40%, so readers should expect tiny allocations for many of the wines. “The limiting factor in 2022 is heat,” Thomas Brown explained. “We lost 20% just through dehydration. The Tuesday after Labor Day (September 6) it was 124°F in St. Helena. I went out to the Sonoma Coast, and it was 104°F at Summa and 102°F at Bodega Thieriot. We have never seen temperatures anything like that. The heat broke around the 10th or 11th, and then we had rain on the 18th.”

In tasting, I was deeply impressed with the 2022 Pinots. It’s a fabulous vintage for these wines in terms of quality and consistency across the range. Some of the 2022s are better than their 2021 counterparts. The 2022s saw 15-16 days on the skins. Whole cluster inclusion was minimal, only the Silver Eagle and Occidental Ridge were fermented with some stems. The wines were aged in barrel, on their lees, with no racking until bottling, which took place in August 2023 for the Pinots and December 2023 for the Chardonnays.