2008 Pinot Noir Solomon Hills

I admit I have mixed feelings about the wines I tasted at Ojai with proprietor Adam Tolmach and winemaker Fabien Castel. On the positive side, the wines are classy, elegant and also very fairly priced considering the quality of what is in the bottle. At the same time, it is obvious yields aren't particularly low, which is somewhat mystifying considering Tolmach works with first-rate sites and is clearly getting pristine fruit. Don't get me wrong, these are excellent wines...but they could be truly great, and maybe beyond great. The cellars are kept cold year-round, while the approach to winemaking remains quite minimalist. All of the whites are fermented in barrel, with full malolactic fermentation and very low levels of new oak. The Pinots are aged on their lees and are racked only before bottling. The Pinots see 25-35% new oak, while the Syrahs see even less. In recent years Tolmach has begun experimenting with whole clusters for both his Pinots and Syrahs.

Adam Tolmach, who co-founded Au Bon Climat with Jim Clendenen in 1982, reiterated that he is committed to making "wines that don't attack you." He told me that his "return to elegance, to the style of wines I was making right after I came back from working in Burgundy (along with Clendenen, at the Abbaye de Morgeot, in Chassagne-Montrachet) in the 1970s," started with the 2005 vintage. "Like a lot of people who went down the blow-your-head-off road in the late '90s I started to realize that I really, really didn't like those wines. Tolmach regularly checks in on wines from his wilderness years. He reports that while some of them have actually turned out really well, "overall they don't have the complexity and vibrancy that I find in the wines I most enjoy drinking-or in the ones I'm making now."