2023 Capiaux, Pinot Noir, Garys’ Vineyard, Santa Lucia Highlands.
Sean Capiaux’s beautiful and deeply flavored 2023 Garys’ Vineyard is a perfect celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Garys’ Vineyard, which Sean has made wine from since he started doing Santa Lucia Highlands Pinots and his fans wouldn’t want to miss it. Dark garnet/ruby in the glass, this 2023 is wonderfully aromatic, complex and has tremendous length with silken layers of blackberry, dark Italian cherry, plum and blood orange fruits, along with a light briar spiciness, vanilla, cinnamon and bergamot notes in this supple medium/fully bodied Pinot. These days Capiaux uses between 10 and 20% whole cluster, a 4-day cold soak and a natural fermentation in open top tanks. The maceration is uniquely done with what Capiaux says is Pulsair (cap management using compressed air) and traditional punch downs. The wine is then pressed to barriques for its secondary malolactic fermentation with the wine aging sur lie 11 months until he does the bottling. The approach has evolved nicely here and the wines, which I’ve followed for almost three decades, have never been better and as rewarding as they are now, especially Sean’s Garys’ and Pisoni Pinots, which are on par with the SLH region’s best producers. I tasted through the 2023s from Capiaux at the big Santa Lucia Highlands tasting this last May and was very impressed with the depth and quality of these Pinots, which, along with Roar, Pisoni’s Lucia and others, showed off the brilliance of the vintage here.
I have been a fan of winemaker Sean Capiaux a long time now, and have reviewed his wines and bought his wines for 20 plus years, who does a great lineup of Pinots under his own label, as seen here, and is the winemaker at O’Shaughnessy, on Howell Mountain in the Napa Valley. Sean Capiaux founded his Capiaux Cellars in 1994, with a focus of producing single vineyard bottlings of Pinot Noir from an array of top sites throughout California, including the famous Garys’ and Pisoni vineyards in the Santa Lucia Highlands. As mentioned many, many times, the Pisoni and Francsioni family’s vineyards are some of the best sources for Pinot Noir in California and the cool Pacific Ocean influenced terroir, with deep sandy loamy soils, makes for serious concentration, while retaining great acidity. This makes these Capiaux efforts very age worthy wines, in fact I just had a 2009 version of the Pisoni and it was absolutely fabulous and still had plenty of life left. I really think 2023, with its long cold growing season, is going to be one of the star vintages to cellar and Capiaux’s are good choices to put down. Sean, who has made wine in the past at Peter Michael, Jordan and Pine Ridge, uses an array of modern equipment, but follows a classic approach to his wines here, which are naturally fermented, get long elevage and are bottled unfined and unfiltered. These techniques, as noted by Capiaux, allows the character of the grapes and terroir of the Pinots to shine though, as well as the Cabernet Sauvignon of Howell Mountain’s picturesque and fantastic O’Shaughnessy Estate, which I also highly recommend.
($65 Est.) 95 Points, grapelive