2021 Chardonnay B. Thieriot Vineyard

This is a stellar set of wines from Thomas Rivers Brown and Genevieve Marie Welsh. I very much admire the energy and vibrancy of the 2021s. It’s hard to know where to start, as so many wines are superb. In the Pinot Noirs, the Sonoma Coast bottling is fabulous. The Anderson Valley Pinot Noir, from Rhys’s Bearwallow vineyard, and the Summa Old Vines are also especially fine in 2021. I expected a little more from the Platt, which is outstanding but not as exceptional as it can be. There are two new Pinots in the range, a bottling from Joy Road (long a source for Chardonnay here) and the first wine from the Thieriot family’s new Bodega Thieriot development in Freestone, a vineyard that bookends an extraordinary collection of sites, including Platt at the opposite end and the Kistler family’s three Occidental ranches in between. Among the Chardonnays, the Platt and Thieriot are a cut above.

The Pinots were done with mostly destemmed fruit (there is a bit of whole cluster in the Silver Eagle and Occidental Ridge) and were bottled in mid-August 2022. The Chardonnays were aged in barrel, with no lees stirring, and were racked to tank in early December for bottling. Best of all, yields in 2021 were generous in Sonoma, quite a difference from 2020, a year in which Rivers-Marie bottled no Sonoma Pinot Noir, just the Bearwallow Pinot from Anderson Valley, and also saw paltry production for their Napa Valley Cabernets.