The Latest Cristaldi Scores
Vintage
Wine
Color
Rating
Vintage
Wine
Color
Rating
100% Pinot Noir, sourced from Hirsch Vineyard, and aged for 16 months in 43% new French oak and 57% one-year-old barrels, this red utilizes fruit from a handful of clones—including Pommard, Mt. Eden and Clone 114— from older vines on the East Ridge. Jeff Mangahas notes that you really have to coax the aromatics out of this wine, because there’s a strong maritime-saline influence that comes through—subtle red-berry tones layered with deep forest notes. The attack is driven by beautifully fine tannins balanced by a succulent mid-palate fruit weight. Those tannins linger with a crushed-mineral, crushed-rock and apple-skin character.
Olivet Lane is one of the most historic vineyards in the Santa Rosa Plains area, located near Martaella and planted in 1974 on AXR1 rootstock to the Martini Heritage clone—a thick-skinned, pulpy Pinot Noir selection. The wine shows remarkable savory complexity: new-boot leather mingles with mulberry fruit, turned earth and ironstone minerality. Aged for 15 months in 65% new French oak and 35% one-year-old barrels, it has excellent mid-weight concentration, carried by featherweight tannins that seem to lift the wine rather than weigh it down. The mid-palate is expansive, yet the finish tightens with precision, length and elegance. Totally balanced. In a word: delicious.
The Westside bottling is sourced from the western corridor of the Russian River Valley. This 100% Pinot Noir is a blend of fruit from vineyard sites along Westside Road: Allen, Bacigalupi, Bucher, Flax, Rochioli Riverblock, Riversmoke and the Williams Selyem Estate. It was aged for 15 months in 60% new French oak and 40% one-year-old barrels. Talk about texture; this wine builds beautifully in the glass with red and mixed-berry fruit, cherry-pie notes and elegant cedarwood character. Cocoa-powder tannins rise effortlessly through layers of intense mineral tension, crunchy ripe fruit, hints of tangerine oil, and a vibrant acidity that keeps everything crisp, taut and balanced.
The Eastside is sourced from the eastern stretch of the Russian River Valley, blending fruit from vineyard sites along Eastside Road: Calgari, Foss and the Lewis MacGregor Estate. These are mostly younger vines. The wine was aged for 15 months in 64% new French oak and 36% one-year-old barrels. Gorgeous, plush textures define this bottling, with a rich, creamy mid-palate weight, a floral personality and fabulous sagebrush and cedarwood notes. It’s sumptuous, with warm brown spices and a robust character shaped by the gravelly, well-drained soils. Dark plum, cassis and blackberry fruit saturate the palate. The texture is especially pronounced, building over beautifully integrated tannins that already feel seamless at this youthful stage.
The Sonoma Coast bottling is bright, crunchy and elegant, with more impactful tannins than even the Russian River Valley Pinot Noir—which has its own impressive textural range. This wine is fresh, inviting and dark-fruited, showing rich conifer and redwood-bark notes, with layers of texture built on a velvety core and grippy apple-skin tannins. Gorgeous cedarwood aromatics mingle with sage, wet stone, clove and citrus zest. A blend of 100% Pinot Noir fruit from Falstaff, Putnam, Starkey and Terra de Promissio, aged for 11 months in 42% new French oak and 58% one-year-old barrels.
This vineyard contributes to the Westside Road Neighbors blend. Planted in 2002, it shares a similar exposure to Allen Vineyard but sits on soils with more loam and streaks of red volcanic clay. As a result, this wine carries a bit more flesh on the mid-palate compared to the Allen Vineyard bottling—full of dark, fleshy red cherry fruit, blackberry and warm brown baking spices, accented by tangerine peel and beautifully elegant cedarwood aromatics. Aged for 16 months in 69% new French oak and 31% one-year-old barrels, the wine is incredibly sophisticated, delicious, and long-lived, showing great wet-slate minerality and cocoa-powder tannins that have both weight and superb texture.
This 100% Pinot Noir comes from Allen Vineyard and was aged for 16 months in 53% new French oak, 47% one-year-old barrels. Allen Vineyard, owned by Howard Allen, sits on gravelly hills along Westside Road and for decades provided fruit for Williams Selyem (and is where the Williams Selyem winery lived for most of its life until 2024). The wine is deeply layered, offering a beautifully expressive core of red fruit framed by warm spices and elegant cedarwood accents. Delicate, finely-tuned tannins add structure without heaviness, suggesting poise and potential longevity. With its balance of richness and restraint, this Pinot has the bones to age gracefully — best enjoyed beginning around 2027.
This 100% Pinot Noir is sourced from the Lewis MacGregor Estate Vineyard (one of the components of the Eastside Road Neighbors bottling) and was aged for 16 months in 62% new French oak and 38% one-year-old barrels. The site is named after John Dyson’s grandfather, who first inspired his interest in agriculture, and was originally owned by Eric Flannigan before Dyson purchased it in 2014 (and replanted much of the Chardonnay to Pinot Noir, while retaining the older vines that now contribute to this bottling). Plant material is roughly two-thirds Pommard and one-third Swan, yielding tiny berries. The wine opens with mulberry fruit and warm brown baking spices, and it carries a distinctive oily texture that comes from the “hens and chicks” clusters—berries with fewer seeds—that this site often produces. Full-flavored and lengthy, it offers remarkable generosity and depth. So flavor-packed and rich.
Sourced from Terra de Promissio Vineyard, which sits in the Petaluma Wind Gap, planted in 2002 to Dijon clones 115 and 777, along with Swan and Calera. Aged for 16 months in 67% new French oak and 33% one-year-old barrels, this 100% Pinot Noir is gorgeously perfumed, showing violet and blueberry coulis aromas with the wonderful natural crispness that defines this cool, windy corridor. Clove spice and wet slate add complexity, and the grippy tannin texture brings depth, energy and a sumptuous layering to the wine’s tension-filled profile. It captures this part of the world in a beautifully articulate way.
This vineyard is one of the components of the Eastside Road Neighbors bottling. This 100% Pinot Noir is sourced from Foss Vineyard and was aged for 16 months in 70% new French oak and 30% one-year-old barrels. The soils here are loamier and heavier, which naturally brings slightly lower acidity, and the plantings lean toward Pommard, Mt. Eden and Swan clones. The wine is unctuous and full-bodied, with a generous red-fruited profile and elegant cedarwood spice, plus a faint agave-like note. A refined cedar framework supports the fruit beautifully. The length is impressive, with real tension, energy and drive. Full-flavored, and lush, yet also lifted and vibrant.
Winemaker Jeff Mangahas explains that this site (the Martaella Vineyard) is planted largely to heritage Pinot clones—selections that originated in Burgundy and have since acclimated beautifully to California conditions. Clones such as Calera (rumored to trace back to Chambertin), Pommard and Martini all play a role here, offering a snapshot of how these historic selections perform on the Santa Rosa Plain, almost squarely in the centre of the northern Russian River Valley. Aged for 15 months in 53% new French oak and 47% one-year-old barrels, the wine is incredibly bold aromatically, showing ultra-fragrant apple-skin notes and perfumed florals. The tannins are remarkably refined—polished, elegant, and giving the wine a buoyant sense of lift. 2022 was the first year Williams Selyem produced a vineyard-designate Pinot Noir from this site.
This 100% Pinot Noir is sourced from Precious Mountain Vineyard and was aged for 16 months in 67% new French oak and 33% one-year-old barrels. Jeff Mangahas notes that Williams Selyem has been making this wine since the late 1990s. The vineyard sits near Hirsch, and includes some of the oldest vines in the area, with plantings going back to 1971. It was originally planted to Alsatian varieties, and today it remains completely dry farmed. That dry farming coaxes out the wild side of Pinot Noir, giving this wine a rich underbrush character—super intense—with notes of leather, ironstone earth, blueberry compote, fresh blueberry fruit and fig paste. The tannins are the most robust of their entire lineup. Full-bodied and full-flavored, it shows incredibly deep, fleshy fruit, yet the wine still feels fresh, vibrant and totally intense.
The Coastlands Vineyard is owned by Ross Cobb, and 2023 marks the final vintage that Williams Selyem will produce from this site. Aged for 16 months in 62% new French oak and 38% one-year-old barrels, the wine wine shows an incredible sous-bois character—local redwood, mineral-rich intensity, and all the wild forest nuance this coastal site is known for. Layers of pomegranate seed, bergamot, red fruit, grapefruit zest and zippy, zingy acidity unfold alongside a distinct sea-salt complexity. There’s a vibrant, refreshing acid spine and even a touch of blood-orange citrus. Dark-fruited, laser-focused and intense, this is a wine built for the long haul—one that will age for a very long time.
This 100% Pinot Noir is sourced from Cohn Vineyard and was aged for 16 months in 58% new French oak and 42% one-year-old barrels. Cohn Vineyard sits off Westside Road, is owned by Benovia, and is one of the oldest Pinot Noir sites in the region—planted in 1970. Jeff Mangahas notes he isn’t entirely sure of the clonal mix, but he loves the texture the vineyard gives. The vines grow in gravelly, red decomposed soil with iron-rich deposits and are surrounded by redwoods—and all of that comes through vividly in the wine. This is a terroir-driven bottling with wonderful savory redwood-bark notes, gravelly minerality and beautifully lush, vibrant red-fruit character that carries through an extended mineral finish. What a wine.
This 100% Pinot Noir is sourced from Bucher Vineyard and was aged for 16 months in 63% new French oak and 37% one-year-old barrels. The original vines were planted in the early 1990s, and Jeff Mangahas began working with the fruit in the early 2000s (he also helped develop the vineyard, refining the spacing and selecting new clonal material). This bottling comes from heritage clones planted in 2011. The wine is built on rich raspberry fruit, loamy earth and an intense, exotic earthiness. There’s even a shiitake mushroom essence and a raw, underbrush, grassy-leather quality, all wrapped around deep berry concentration on the palate. Beautifully grippy intensity carries the finish, which resolves with an unctuous, delicious richness. The balance between primary fruit and deep earthy spice is exceptional.
This vineyard is one of the key components in the Eastside Road Neighbors bottling. This 100% Pinot Noir is sourced from Calegari Vineyard and was aged for 16 months in 63% new French oak and 37% one-year-old barrels. The plant material here includes Dijon 115—which has thicker skins—as well as Swan and Mt. Eden heritage clones. The wine delivers explosive red-fruit character: cranberry, cherry and rose petals, all lifted by warm brown baking spices. Full-bodied richness is balanced by a vivid saline–citrus acid tension that frames this youthfully exuberant wine. That salty mineral edge comes directly from this gravelly site. The finish is highly expressive and super floral, anchoring the aromatics while showcasing great fruit depth on the palate. What a wine.
Sourced from Rochioli Riverblock Vineyard, a site that sits along the riverbank, sourced from a 1989 planting established using budwood from a 1960s block. The vines grow in silty, well-drained soils, and the aromas are wonderfully intriguing—wild herbs, live oak, and the wild fennel that grows along the Russian River. On the palate, the wine is succulent, showing mulberry and raspberry fruit with palate-coating tannins that are refined and elegant yet still robust. It’s highly aromatic, fresh and inviting, and the wine feels like the pure culmination of what this site naturally expresses—both aromatically and in flavor. Aged for 16 months in 68% new French oak and 32% one-year-old barrels.
The grapes for this wine were sourced entirely from Hopkins River Ranch in the heart of the Russian River Valley, where Bob Hopkins has been farming wine grapes on his family’s property off Eastside Road since the 1970s. Fermented and aged for five months in a combination of older oak (58%) and stainless steel barrels (42%), the wine is crunchy, crisp, and super tart, with bright lime acidity, grassy nuances, and tropical fruit character reminiscent of kiwi and green apple. Vaughn Duffy is a small, family-owned winery based in Sonoma County producing about 3,000 cases annually and specializing in Pinot Noir. The wines are crafted by forklift-wiz-turned-winemaker Matt Duffy, who co-founded the winery in 2009 with his wife, Sara Vaughn.
From the Bacigalupi family’s historic Goddard Ranch—the first property Helen and Charles Bacigalupi purchased in the 1950s, and the source of grapes used in Chateau Montelena’s legendary 1973 Chardonnay that won the Judgement of Paris—this wine carries a remarkable legacy. Aged for 10 months in French oak barrels (50% new), it offers layers of baked lemon, orchard fruit, lemon oil, and French pastry richness, all seamlessly integrated. Vaughn Duffy is a small, family-owned winery based in Sonoma County producing about 3,000 cases annually and specializing in Pinot Noir. The wines are crafted by forklift-wiz-turned-winemaker Matt Duffy, who co-founded the winery in 2009 with his wife, Sara Vaughn.
Two blocks at Bacigalupi’s Frost Ranch comprise this 2023 Pinot Noir: the Wente selection, picked two weeks later than in 2022, and the Pommard block, picked in October. The wine aged ten months in French oak barrels (33% new). It’s dark-fruited, with the ripe cherry appeal so prevalent in wines from this stretch of the Russian River Valley, brightened by orange peel and grapefruit zest. Cola nut fills in the gaps, joined by the creamy richness of the fruit and muscular tannins that form a solid foundation for this delectable wine. Vaughn Duffy is a small, family-owned winery based in Sonoma County producing about 3,000 cases annually and specializing in Pinot Noir. The wines are crafted by forklift-wiz-turned-winemaker Matt Duffy, who co-founded the winery in 2009 with his wife, Sara Vaughn.
