 Oh, hello, welcome back to Exotic Wine Travel. I am your host, Matthew Horky. I'm Shareen Ty. Welcome back to the show today. Another show that Shareen is very excited for, where you are gonna be doing value peanut oars from, sorry, from Charnage, from Santa Barbara County. Are you excited? Very much. Before we get started, guys, I wanna let you know this video has not been paid for in any way, shape, or form. But if you do like these videos, if you do find value in them, check out our guide to the wines of Santa Barbara called Sipping Santa Barbara. Recommended wines, I'm pretty serious. On Kindle, Amazon, sorry, on Amazon, for Kindle, EPUB, and PDF, I'll put it up on the screen. Before we get started, we're getting ready to prepare. We're corvin' these wines with our Corvin Model 2 Elite. Thank you so much to Corvin for giving us this test sample. I guess we used it on two of the three except the screw tap. And we poured into these a beautiful, beautiful. Gabrielle Glass Gold Edition, hand-blown glasses. These things are light, they're universal. They've worked for every single wine that we, fantastic, 95 grams. These are great, right? Yeah, I'm really excited about this episode for Gabrielle Glass because I love the Zalto glass, the Burgundian glass, to be honest. But I tend to find that a lot of people don't know why it loses a lot of fruit in the Zalto Burgundian glass. So this is gonna be a good test for us. To see how you are. You got me into Zalto, like everything. So, yes, anyways, I will put a discount code up for the glasses at Gabrielle Glass Stemware at the end of the video. We're not affiliates in any way, shape, or form. It's just something nice to see. Okay, let's get started here. We have three value-driven Pinot Noirs. And what I mean by that is under 30 US dollars. I know 30 US dollars to a lot of people for a bottle of wine can be ridiculous, but in the world of fine wine, Pinot Noir, that's fairly low. And I think all these wines that we have at 22, 30, and 29, but I've seen all of these wines under 30 on different websites, retail wine searcher. So are you ready to get started? Let's go for it. The first one we have, legendary producer, Obon Kolmoth, Santa Barbara County Pinot Noir, 2016 by the legendary Jim Clinton. This bodily, not this vintage, was the first Pinot Noir from Santa Barbara County that we ever had in Atlanta, in the restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia. And we had together. Yeah, so that we had together. I'm sorry. I'm ready to get started. Legendary producer is Jim Clendenin, a producer that Shireen loves. We did his basic Chardonnay, which I thought was lovely. We have a couple of his reserve bottlings that we're gonna be tasting, new vintages. You'll have to stay tuned. Let's just put it very straightforward. I like his wine so much that I actually aspire and hope to one day work with him and learn from him. Wow. All right, let's get started here. This is from Santa Maria, cooler weather. As you can see, true Pinot color. It's not super over-extracted. You like it already, I think. Yeah, it's slightly, I don't really like to use the whip perfume because it's too general, but it has a very pretty nose. Raspberry, cherry. Cool whip. Yeah, yeah. The new whip is whipped cream, American whipped cream, a little bit vanilla. This wine always, to me, outperforms its price. This wine is good vintage after vintage. 2016 Santa Barbara was supposed to have a little more lively acidity. This is lovely, right? Yeah. This is just like good, high-quality Pinot noir. Hmm, the palette might surprise you. Very nice, juicy acidity, but I do get still a little bit of tendons that I wasn't expecting, and I like it because it sets the structure of the wine in the mouth. Like to me and body, this is the type of wine you bring to somebody that wants to, maybe somebody that likes wine but has been drinking kind of supermarket wines, they want to step up a little bit. They've been hearing about Pinot noir, they don't know what all the fuss is. This is a very good bottle to bring in front of people. Already to me, acting more, like a more expensive Pinot noir than $22, I would have to say. I would definitely agree, yeah. I mean, I'm especially priced 4.1 on this, easy. I think it's a very beautiful wine. Maybe even 4.2, this is nice. Quite earthy in the mouth as well. I'll go 4.1. More fruit than earth, I still get this earthy undertone. Yeah, this is more fruity Pinot noir. Jim Clinton strives to make a more Burgundian style wine such as Chardonnay Pinot noir. His other Pinot noir can be more earthy, really complex, this is just fruity, fun, easy to drink. I like it a lot. Good job, Jim. Let's move on here. We have the J Wilkes Centimary of Alley Pinot noir from 2015. The Miller family owns this. They also own a good portion of the famous Biennacito vineyard in Centimary of Alley. Wes Hagen is the producer, he is our friend. He's done a lot for Santa Barbara County in terms of drawing up draft papers, white papers for the American viticulture areas in the region. He used to make wine for clopepe. Thank you, Wes, for sending us a few bottles. Wes also helped us a lot in our research for the book as well. He set us through and walked us through the different appellations and the differences. I mean, he basically gave us a crash course. And he was in these, even though he's a super sharp guy, he didn't poo poo on our book. He actually liked our book, right? So let's get into this here. I have to preface, we've already done two shows with a J Wilkes Chardonnay and Pinot blanc which I thought were lovely. And I'm so surprised because I have not been huge fans of J Wilkes wines in the past, although this is the first vintage that Wes is fully at the helm. Let's give this a smell here. I was very fond of this Pinot blanc when we visited. Yeah, but... Darker, this is significantly darker in color, 30 US dollars. He has darker food as well, more cherry. There's still a bit of floral undertone to it, absolutely beautiful. This is more fall leaves, earthy, the stuff that Pinot blanc can pick up. Amber, something a little bit musky. I'm impressed with some of the J Wilkes offerings, right? So far, this is definitely going to appeal to more old world fans. Beautiful fruit in the mouth. The fruit intensity is stunning. Wes, I'm not making this up. This is not prescripted. I am very impressed with the new offerings of J Wilkes, right? I'm going to take a sip of this. It's spicy on the finish. I don't want to be biased, but I think this wine is going to win this round. This is, I mean, this is... So these wines are unequal in terms of quality. My personal palate, I like the little bit more earthy flavors in the J Wilkes. This has a long finish. I think I'm 4.2, 4.1 on the oboe and climat. Like, again, scores don't really matter, but that's what's going to go into our Vivino account. I like how this wine plays with my mouth. How he hits different parts of my mouth. And the finish is really clean. The wine. All right, pour it back. Oh, you're going to save me a drink some for later. Okay. Let's move on. I'm surprised. Okay. Next up. We have the Hitching Post Cork Dancer by Hart Leostini, Pino Norris, Santa Barbara County, 2015, 29 US dollars. For those of you that don't know, if you've seen the movie Sideways, Maya the Waitress is working at the Hitching Post, and that's where they go several times in the film. When we went there, some of their Pino Norris are made to be young and approachable because I think Frank is also a chef. He cooks meats, he grills meats, he wants his Pino's to be had with meat. Yeah, yeah. Yes, that wine. The Cork Dancer was the leanest and the most European out of the ones I tasted, the ones I liked the most. So I am excited to taste this wine. This is the new vintage. And I'm excited to taste it. This is from fruit all over Santa Barbara County. Could be, there's no vineyard designation so it could be Santa Maria Valley, Santa Maria Hills. Let's give this a taste. Exactly how I remember their wines. Nice. This has a graphite nose. This has a little bit of meatiness. Maybe it's because I said meat, you know, he's working in meat. It has brighter food flavors too. Are you more impressed by this than we're impressed? No, no, no, it's exactly the same nose that I remember the Cork Dancer to be. Cranberry. They have a lot of crunchiness even on the nose. This is the fruitiest by far. This is the earthiest. This is in between the flavors I think, right? It does have some earth notes. Let's give this a taste, shall we? Which then? Nice finish. I find this the brightest. That's fruity, but this is bright. It has nice, very, very good acidic spine. Is this overperforming your expectation? Because you say the Fitchick post-wine sometimes could be a little bit too, like, Swedish? Yeah, to me, too much, yes. It can be too much. I like this. It's linear to me, like you said. I think this is beautiful. This is really hard, because these wines are all, good job. Hold on, I'm gonna take a little bit of a sip of this. I like it. Let's get some spice too. All these wines are True Pinot Noirs. They're light to maybe medium body that most delicious. I'm gonna say 4.2 for me. 4.1, 4.1. I think these are nice efforts to seek out, you might be interested. This steps up just to touch in complexity. They're not the greatest and the most complex Pinot Noirs that we found in Santa Barbara County, but for value-driven wines, I think I am very happy. What do you think? As an introduction to Santa Barbara Pinot Noir, I don't think anyone's gonna be discouraged or disappointed when they drink this wine. For me, personal preference, this is much more my style, the J-Works, but I always drink and imagine myself in the other people's position. And I'd imagine that if someone, like you said earlier, they don't really know wine, but they wanna understand the sensory merits of wine, I think the Au Bon Climote is great and easy to understand. But if it's like for a dinner party and people say they wanna enjoy it themselves, they have like a $30 budget, this is without a doubt it's gonna perform well. So you're not gonna go wrong with all three of these wines Au Bon Climote, J-Wilkes and Hitching Post. So check them out, I will put the links in the description box. Chance, good show so far. Guys, I'm gonna put the, excuse me, discount code for the Gabrielle Glass Stemware up on the screen. You get 15% off the standard, the hand, sorry, the standard machine blown and the alpha decanter, we are not affiliates. So use it like you, use the code like you want to with no fear and also check out our guide to the wines of Santa Barbara, Sipping Santa Barbara. Recommended wines and producers. Anything you wanna say before signing off on these nice Pinot? The Gabrielle Glass is fantastic for lighter, younger Pinot Noir. I will not change my opinion. Nice job, everybody here. So guys, if you like this video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel, I'm so excited for your travel. And I'll see you at the next episode.