Mt Pajaro Vineyard, Pinot Noir, 2022
Wonderful aromatics, cool yet almost exotic, with floral notes and touches of spice and then on the palate, plenty of cracked stone mineral notes, cool, restrained fruit, and a web of fine tannin below. It’s a precise, pixellated wine with that laser-beam down-the-middle quality that the Chardonnay has, but more flesh surrounding it than in previous vintages. If the bouquet continues to develop along the lines it is showing today, this is going to be irresistible in three or four years’ time.
critic reviews
Showing more and more complexity with each passing vintage, the 2022 Pinot Noir Mt. Pajaro Vineyard opens with an intense but bright nose of beaming saline-tinged red fruits, accented by turned earth and exotic spice aromas. The palate begins on an understated note, quickly transitioning to a pure, vibrant and playfully agile texture after some time in the glass. It concludes with a remarkably rich and concentrated finish that slowly unfolds yet retains the high-toned energy and fine-grained tannins that are this site's signature. As with a few of the Rhys 2022s, this was my favorite iteration of the Mt. Pajaro Pinot Noir thus far.
The 2022 Pinot Noir Mt. Pajaro Vineyard is the one Santa Cruz Mountains Pinot in this range made from a site that is not in the vicinity of the winery. It opens with a blast of heady, red-toned fruit. Cedar, sweet pipe tobacco, orange confit, mint and espresso develop later. Today, the 2022 is a bit of an extrovert. Time in bottle should help soften some of that youthful exuberance. Even so, I expect the 2022 will remain pretty overt relative to prior vintages.