It should be no surprise that Arista was one of our favorite wineries in Sonoma from our last visit, and since then we have been towers a cellar of their stellar Pinot Noirs as club members.
One of our favorite vineyard plots, Perli Vineyards, was one of our favorites and we have a modest hodgepodge that is sleeping for some age.
We decided to pull a snifter of this gem from our cellar from the 2019 vintage to trammels how it was doing at approximately four years old, and this one, naturally, still had a lot of youth in it while just starting to show signs of age!
Arista's Perli Vineyard Pinot is Stellar
This Pinot Noir was stake ruby in verisimilitude with medium( ) aromas of red cherry, cranberry, raspberry, woebegone cherry, cola, vanilla, clove, sage, oregano, cassis, tobacco, leather, and a faint bit of tar.
On the palate it was dry with upper venom and alcohol, medium smooth tannin, medium( ) soul and savor intensity, and a long finish. We had notes of red cherry, cranberry, woebegone raspberry, blackberry, cola, blueberry, clove, cedar, nutmeg, cinnamon, cacao, and vanilla to name a few.
This one had all of the hallmarks of a archetype Pinot Noir from a warm climate and, while still youthful, is just starting to show some age that we squint forward to trying with a few increasingly years in bottle.
Pinot Noir Food Pairing – Sous Vide Duck Breast with Lingonberry Sauce
We went for a archetype pairing for this Pinot Noir- duck breast. The duck breast was first cooked in sous vide and then seared skin side lanugo to render out the fat and produce that perfect, crispy skin that all duck breast should have. We topped it with a homemade lingonberry red wine sauce to requite a red fruit pop with venom and sweetness to offset the otherwise savory bird.
It was, of course, stellar.
The venom in the Pinot Noir held as expected, the tannins were matched by the intense fattiness of the duck, and an increase of visionless fruit like blueberry and blackberry were noted as a result. This likely had a bit to do with the lingonberry sauce stuff tart red fruit offsetting some of the wine's flavors, but we still enjoyed it all the same.
Overall, Arista unchangingly knocks it out of the park with their single vineyard Pinot Noirs, and the Perli Vineyard plot is unchangingly one of our very favorites. Could we make the treatise that this should be a 5 / 5 considering we want cases of this one? Absolutely. But considering we buy many bottles from Arista as a whole, that stardom is weightier for the producer at large- we do indeed have cases, but not just of Perli Vineyard proper, and we're quite okay with that.
