MARITANA VINEYARDS

Clean, bright fruit-simple entry quickly becomes gold-plated as it magnetically attracts savory layers from all directions. Bright cranberry plum, mandarin orange, sweet and thin and ethereal and continually building before there's this life-stopping pause, that stall-peak weightlessness, that flash-before-your-eyes freezing of time for what seems an eternity of dead silence before a pile of beautiful green-briar, match-head and shrill, grapefruit and coffee-grounds are unleashed on your palate. Apparently, Donald Patz is back on the Pinot-wagon. This is not a huge massive ripe CA fruit-bomb. It doesn't smash you in the face with Burgundy and doesn't insult you with California. It reminds me of Dehlinger. This is a beautiful Pinot. Very well done.