2011 Pinot Noir Kanzler

The team at Kosta Browne has done a terrific job with their 2011s considering the challenges of the vintage. There are a few hidden gems in this lineup, including the 2011 Sonoma Coast Pinot, a wine that is the equal of some of the vineyard designates. Kosta Browne has recently completed their new facility at The Barlow in Sebastopol, and it is impressive. Unfortunately I was not able to taste the 2012s as they were literally being bottled at the time of my visit. Going forward, I will be changing the timing of my tastings of the Kosta Browne wines in order to be more timely.

I tasted this year's set of releases with the Kosta Browne team at their massive, fully tricked out new winery in the new Barlow wine and food complex under construction on the east side of Sebastopol. There was clearly no expense spared to construct what Michael Browne called "a winemaker's dream come true."Almost 60,000 square feet of space is spread across three large facilities, not to mention state-of-the-art labs, equipment and fancy French wooden upright fermentation tanks.Two thousand and eleven "was a really difficult vintage for getting things ripe" Browne said, "but the positive angle is that the wines have great freshness and precision without weight."Browne said that warm, and even hot weather in late July and on into September "jump-started the sugars" and his teams were able to start harvesting fruit in mid-September.He also has a somewhat more positive take on the June rains than some of his colleagues, noting that they helped replenish the water tables, thus aiding the vines through the hot late summer."People need to taste the wines for themselves," he said, "because it's really easy to make it look like a bad year on paper, but it's not that easy because people harvested at different times under different conditions.It's the polar opposite of a homogeneous vintage."