2009 Pinot Noir Melville Vineyard

This year's line-up of wines confirmed for me the rapid ascension of Chad Melville's Samsara to the upper tier of Santa Barbara wineries, but production here is still small. "It always will be," Melville told me, "because that's how I want it." He has plenty of other activities on his plate, he said, especially the management of his family's Melville vineyard. Although he loves to work with whole clusters for fermentation he doesn't want to get stuck on a recipe. "If the stems are right for whole-cluster work, I use them. If they're not right, out they go." It's rare that he will use more than 25% new oak "because that's pretty much my limit for where it takes away from the fruit." The one bottled pinot from 2010 and barrel samples of a number of other wines from that year suggest that it will be a very successful group of intense but elegant wines, by the way. Melville was able to pick into November "without the sugars running away and without any drop in acidity," he told me.

Chad Melville manages the vineyards for his family's Melville estate and makes the Samsara wines in a small rented facility in Lompoc. The wines are fermented with indigenous yeasts, aged in French oak (0$25.00% new) and bottled with no fining or filtration. The 2009 saw a fairly high percentage of whole clusters ranging from 50-100%. These are gorgeous, pure wines from an inspired, young producer whose career will be fascinating to follow. All of the Pinots were in bottle at the time of my June visit, while the Grenache and the three Syrahs I tasted were scheduled to be bottled in August.