While the best Pinot Noir still comes from Burgundy, it is being produced with increasing success in cooler climates around the world. The varietal is also known, perhaps better than any, for its ability to translate terroir, or a sense of place. At its best, Pinot Noir creates elegant wines that are filled with primary red fruit aromas and flavors while young, revealing with an array of secondary characteristics like earth, smoke, violet, truffle and game with age. The parent of varietals like Pinot Gris/Grigio and Pinot Blanc, Pinot Noir is blue to violet to indigo in color with relatively thin skins, and it is said to have been cultivated in France for more than 2,000 years.

One of France's most legendary grapes and the grape that earned Burgundy its reputation.

A baby now, in Thackrey's words: 'they are all charming, and can be tasted with pleasure, but I think with less elightenment than will be the case when they are mature and their full individual characters have bloomed.' This, the fifth wine, blends all of the four clones to demonstrate how the characterisitcs of each informs the wine. There are actually five wines that make up the Cassiopeia project-four made from a single Dijon clone (114, 115, 167 or 777) all grafted to identical rootstock, planted at the same time, farmed identically and subject to the same exposure at the Wentzel Vineyard in the Anderson Valley. Cassiopeia, named for the constellation, is a more recent project that was conceived as an exploration of clonal influence. Sean Thackrey is a man, it seems, in the pursuit of knowledge, a scientist of sorts, concocting experiments with grapes to tantalize the senses. Give this wine another 3-5 years and see which has taken front row. Interesting to taste now, with hints of each of its clonal brethren.

2010 Sean Thackrey 'Cassiopeia' Anderson Valley Pinot NoirĪ blend of Sean Thackrey’s four Pinot clones, all grown in one block of the Wentzel Vineyard, this wine is a baby still, soft and lush and ready to develop further.

2010 clone 5 santa barbara pinot noir