2012 Pinot Noir Jensen Vineyard

This wine was part of a retrospective tasting, Calera Jensen Vineyard Pinot Noir – A Journey Through Time 1978-2013.

Since his debut vintage in 1978, Josh Jensen has shown he has the magic touch with Pinot Noir at Calera. This once-in-a-lifetime tasting traced the arc of Jensen’s brilliant career through a series of remarkable Pinots that set the bar for what is possible in California.

After internships at Dujac and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Josh Jensen returned to his native California in search of vineyard land on limestone soils. Jensen found what he was looking for high atop Mount Harlan, a rugged, hillside property outside Hollister. In the mid-1970s Jensen began developing the land. The resulting vineyards, all of which lie on the same property, give birth to some of the most compelling California Pinots and Chardonnays readers will come across. Given his Burgundian leanings, Jensen vinifies all of this Pinots with 100% whole clusters, with the exception of the de Villiers, which is usually rendered with 50% stems. The 2012 Pinots are fleshy, open and seductive, which is to say very much in the style of the year. Calera fans can also look forward to a complete retrospective of the Jensen Vineyard Pinot Noir, which I tasted all the way back to the inaugural 1978 vintage during a recent visit to the winery.

Editors note: Calera is not in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but as a practical matter the wines have historically been presented in this article for the sake of comparison to other wines with similar characteristics.