2013 Chardonnay South River

This is a gorgeous set of wines from Tom Rochioli. My sense is that the wines, the Chardonnays in particular, are being made in a bit more of a laid-back style relative to the past, with greater emphasis on freshness and gentler extractions. Readers will sense that right away in the Estate, the only Rochioli Chardonnay that enters broad distribution. There is plenty of depth in the Chardonnays, but there is little question the wines have shifted away a bit from the more overt approach favored in years past. The 2013 Pinots are also quite expressive. Here, too, the wines are less extracted than they used to be, but changes in the vinification of Pinot started a few years earlier than they did in Chardonnay. The 2013 harvest started in September with the Pinots, followed by the Sauvignon Blanc and wrapped up with the Chardonnays in October. Rochioli remains a reference point estate for the Russian River Valley and Sonoma more broadly.

Tom Rochioli calls 2012 a grower's dream, in the sense that "you didn't need to do anything, you could take a cruise" if getting a big crop was your agenda. Like most old-timers who tend to hedge rather than hype, he said that keeping yields in check was the key to success with '12. With that in mind, he expressed real affection for his 2011 pinots, which he thinks show "their place and real pinot style," which is not quite possible in hotter years.New oak continues to be dialed back here, which is a conscious effort on the part of Rochioli "to get the fruit out there" as much as possible, but he's also trying to make more elegant wines like the great Burgundies that he said turned him on to pinot in the first place.He's proud of his wines from the late 1990s and early 2000s but thinks that he's now getting closer to maximizing finesse over "massive fruit."There's no lack of natural acidity in his fruit, he said, "so reining in the ripeness is the real job."Incidentally, Rochioli said that he generally likes to drink his wines at "somewhere around six, seven or eight years," which he thinks is the sweet spot where the baby fat has fallen off but the fruit's still vibrant.