2024 Farm Cottage, Pinot Noir, Santa Cruz Mountains.
The beautiful, dark ruby and supple Santa Cruz Mountains 2024 Farm Cottage Pinot Noir by winemaker Ryan Alfaro, which leans heavily on his family’s estate vineyard in Corralitos, shows off a generous personality of layered vinous red berry, cranberry, strawberry, pomegranate and a deep core of cherry fruit, along with subtle wood notes, rose petal florals, orange tea, snappy spice and savory undertones. All nicely focused and silky, but with a good lift of acidity and lots of length, this is the wine in the fabulous latest set from Alfaro that begs to be drunk first and often, while the others look to be better with a touch more age. The 2024 Santa Cruz Mountain Pinot Noir Alfaro says consists of 3 vineyards from within the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA, including estate owned Trout Gulch and Alfaro Family vineyards, along with the non estate Lester Family Vineyard site, all (of which) have their unique clonal materials, site elevation, and soil composition, which help(s) showcase the Santa Cruz Mountains as a whole in this bottling. The 2024s are stellar wines from Farm Cottage, expressive, delicious and well structured, making them exceptional values in California cool climate wines, with the Pinots, which include a good amount of stems, being especially thrilling, transparent and stylish efforts.
As mentioned before here, Ryan Alfaro’s Farm Cottage label is really grabbing the attention of the critics and wine enthusiasts with an already impressive set of vintages under his belt and the quality of his latest wines reaching new heights, this is a winery to follow. Ryan is a second generation winemaker, and recently took over all the winemaking duties from his father Richard Alfaro who was one of the pioneers of the Corralitos region of the Santa Cruz Mountains, having started planting here in the late half of the 1990s. This area, only about 3 or so miles from the Pacific Ocean as a crow flies, has a cool marine climate and a long growing season, allowing for deep complexity of flavors to develop and all the while holding plenty of acidity, which makes for the sublime balance found in the wines. The younger Alfaro spent time studying in New Zealand and mentored under the legendary Adam Tolmach of Ojai Vineyards, as well as under his accomplished father. I got a chance to preview the Farm Cottage 2024 releases and have already highlighted a couple of my favorites, with the Trout Gulch Chardonnay and Pinot Noir offerings being stars here, but this wine should not be overlooked. Ryan employed close to 77% whole cluster, did native yeast fermentations on each lot and did daily punch downs, with about 8 or so days on the skins before gong neutral French oak barrels to age.
($40 Est.) 94 Points, grapelive