2011 Pinot Noir Kessler Haak

In Chad Melville's opinion "great wine should stimulate you and take you on a kind of mental journey.It should be somewhat of a challenge, not just upfront fruit, which is too easy."In fact, he told me, "if you taste lots of fruitiness right off the bat you should wonder what the wine's going to be like down the road.Where can it go from there?"Melville has been making his Samsara wines in a style that he says "calls for aging, and hopefully pays back the investment in complexity," which he prizes more than "immediate gratification with no real upside."He likes to let the vintage take the wheel when it comes to his winemaking and will adjust stem inclusion and oak treatments based on "what a given site in a given year dictates, not on a strict recipe."So there will be differences in the wines here across vintages and even across vineyards in the same year, which Melville believes "keeps it interesting and really keeps me interested."

SAMsARA is one of the most dynamic, exciting young wineries in California. Proprietor Chad Melville turns out compelling Pinots, Syrahs and Grenaches from some of the top sites in Santa Barbara, including his family's Melville estate, where he is vineyard manager. The approach at SAMsARA is stripped down to the core. Native fermentations with high percentages of whole clusters, aging largely in neutral oak, very low SO2 during aging and minimal racking are all part of the approach at SAMsARA. These are some of the most compelling wines being made in California today. Readers who want to see and hear more of Chad Melville's thoughts on 2011 might enjoy this recent video interview.