2017 Pinot Noir (Santa Cruz Mountains)

This is a mixed set of wines from Fogarty. As a group, the Chardonnays are more successful than the Pinots, but all the wines show the effects of the intense Labor Day heat spikes. Pinot, with its thinner skins, and the timing of the harvest, clearly bore the worst of it. Some of the 2017 Pinots are light and lacking in body relative to the norm here. "The heat was forecast," winemaker Nathan Kandler told me. "The question was how much fruit we could get off before." In the winery, Kandler opted for shorter macerations, but there is no way getting around the fact that much of the Pinot was not harvested at the optimal time. As always, the Pinots spend 18 months in oak, except the appellation Pinot, which sees 11 months in barrel. All of the Chardonnays spend 11 months in oak followed by 7 in steel.