 Welcome back to Exotic Wine Travel. I am your host, Matthew Horkey. Hi, I'm Shereen Tan. Welcome back to the show today. We have a great show lined up. We're going to be doing single vineyard estate-grown Pinot Noir from Santa Rita Hills. Exciting. You are excited. Before we get started into this great show, I want to let you know that this video has not been paid for in any way, shape, or form. But if you do like this video, if it does give you value, check out our guide, the wines of Santa Barbara called Sitting Santa Barbara, Recommended Wines and Produces. Yeah, I'll put up on the screens available on Kindle, PDF, and Moby E Pub. Check it out. We put a lot of work into it. Let's get started into these wines here. As you can see, we Coravin these out into from our Coravin Model 2 Elite. Thanks to Coravin for providing us with a sample unit to use and we're pouring them into these. A beautiful, you show them those, Gabriel Gold Hand Blown Glasses. How thin the stem is. They are lighter than Zalto. I will put a discount code up for Gabriel Glass Stemware at the end of the video. Let's go. Okay, Santa Rita Hills. For those of you who don't know, the western side of Santa Barbara County, where Sideways was filmed, there's these two sets of valleys and they're east west, so the Pacific air just blows through there, keeps the fruit nice and cool, even though you still have the California Sun, it's cool. We were there in June and we needed a jacket at night. It was so cold, right? What do you like about Santa Rita Hills, Peter Noire? Personal preference. I usually find myself more interested in Santa Rita Hills, Peter Noire, when compared to Santa Maria, because I find that it's usually Santa Rita Hills, Peter Noire is more structured, it's bigger, the tendons are more powerful. I also think at times that a lot of these wines need more aging than wines from other areas. Well, check it out. I'm interested to see, because we have lots of great Santa Maria Valley, Peter Noire is to be tasting on the show too. Let's get started. The first one we have is the Ampelos. Peter Noire 2013, row the correlation from the Ampelos vineyard. This, their vineyard, their Ampelos vineyard, was the first in America to be certified organic, biodynamic, and sustainable farming. So as we talked about, in Santa Barbara County, everyone has a few vineyards, besides the bigger producers, but a lot of people are buying fruit from other vineyards. These are all fruit from these producers own vineyards. Let's take a look at this. I am a big fan of Ampelos wines. Their son, Peter and Rebecca are the owners, winemakers, and their son is the winemaker for the Colt winery, Sea Smoke. Let's give this a go. We have had the 2012. I have not had this vintage yet. Nice color, not super dark, not super extracted. Let's give this a go. Ampelos wines tend to be pretty fruity for me. Cherry, a little bit of cinnamon spice. And earth. Good start to this show, right? Are you liking the nose? Love it. What cherry soda like? Yeah, do you give it a perfume? You know, for incendiary to hills, I get cool whip a lot, like berries and cool whip. You know what I'm talking about? The whipped cream? It's not the first thing that comes to mind for me. I see where you're coming from. Some earth perfume smells like nice peanut oil. Ready to give this a little bit of a taste? Some green oats as well. Nice way in the mouth. What do you think? Lovely long M-pallet. The M-pallet gets a little bit grassy. Good. Lots of texture. This is a medium-bodied effort for a peanut oar. It's not huge, tans aren't big. It's got a little bit of a spicy finish, which is intriguing me a little bit. Long end pallet. I'm quite high on this. What do you think? The only down tracker for me, it's not a big deal, is the wood shows up a little bit heavy for me on this wine. It's not super oaky, but just for me, sometimes I get sensitive to that. It's more sensitive to open. For me, I'm perfectly fine with it. You like this quite a bit? Yeah, I like this quite a bit. It's easy drinking. This is $13. It's going to be fruity. Great peanut oar start. $45 US dollars. For me, I'm 4.2. I'm going to say 4.3. I'm just going to go 4.2, 4.3 range. Maybe I'll go back to a taste. Let's move on. You know, you need to calibrate it. Yeah, good job by Peter and Rebecca. I am so excited to taste this vintage. This is the top peanut oar from Dearberg, the peanut oar. Drum Canyon Vineyard from 2014. $52 US dollars. Tyler Thomas is the winemaker. Owners are Jim and Mary, Dearberg, if I remember. Jim and Mary, correct. Jim and Mary. They also own Star Lane. We did an episode in the Cabernet Sauvignon, which was. I took a sniff and my instinct was I wanted to stand up. I realized that if I stand up, I will be out of the frame. So you like this a lot, huh? Very attractive. This has a humongous score, by the way, by Antonia Galonia-Venice. It's not supposed to check before the show. Candy cherry for me a little bit. Yeah. Cherry is brighter. This is really attractive. No, it's a little bit of perfume. What else? Much more earthy than the previous one. Yeah, it's more fruit play. This is a little more subtle. Floral too. Yeah. Are you liking this a lot? Let's give this a go. It has tenons, man. I love it, love it, love it, love it. For a peanut oar, it has some grip, right? Wow. That's nice peanut oar. The finish has a lot of like rose taste to it. Very long and grippy. This is everything I like about great peanut oar. It's subtly powerful for me. The tenons provide subtle power. This is delicate. This is earthy. I'm going to tell you right now. This is for more maybe more hardcore critical palettes. This is kind of. I'm not critical. Yeah, you are. This is for everybody. Not to say this is critical palette. We appreciate this a lot, but it's also for for kind of like everybody, right? So to speak, is that what you think? To me, I find that this is perfectly radiating. I don't have to think so hard. Whereas for this, you know, because of the tenons and the structure, I would prefer to age it or I might just drink like two glasses and I'll be done with it. Great, but great stuff. I'm going to go. For me, I'm going humongous on this. I'm going 4.4. Wait a minute. Like John Sebastiano, the John Sebastiano and Bonacorsi. But it's going to be hard to score all these wines because the wines are so good just for my personal preference. Let's move on. You know, this time I'm going to pour it back here. I'm going to drink it later. Okay, let's move on. One of our favorite producers in Santa Barbara County. This is the excuse me. This is the Longoria Senorita Hills Faciaga Vineyard 2014 55 US dollars. Rick Longoria was the first person to start the Lumbok ghetto wine ghetto in Lumbok, California on the just west of just yeah, just west of Centurita Hills blocks of warehouses. We've been there was a bunch of tasting rooms, awesome place, cool hip vibe. Longoria is one of our favorite producers. The Faciaga Vineyard is his vineyard. Shareen loves this vineyard. We love this wine had 2013 and it was one of the more impressive pinot noir's I think we had from the area, right? Let's give this a little bit of a go here, shall we? Brown sugar. Oh, it's exactly like I remember his style, right? A little bit of blueberry to it actually. Blueberry, raspberry, cherry, strawberry for me. Spicy, spicy, spicy. Spicy? Yeah. Oh, this is nice. The brown spice comes all through earthy brown spice. That's the distinguishing difference for me. Oh, you love him this, right? The fruit smells dark out here. Rick Longoria is one of the veterans of Santa Rita Hills and of Santa Barbara County. And his wife Diane is lovely. If you're lucky, you'll see her in the tasting. And let's give this a go. Spicy is bigger in a mug as well. This is a little bit more, the difference is a little bit more linear in expression. That's more easy going. This is linear because of the tenons. Whereas this is like full in the mouth. It's almost like, it's almost like this is like, this is fruity. This is the earthy one. This is in between to me in terms of flavor profile. These Pinot Noirs are not huge, extracted, rich Pinot Noirs. They are true Pinot Noirs. You're going to see the color, beautiful color. I think I'm, I think I'm 4.3 on both 4.4. I might prefer the Dearberg just a little bit more, but I think these are both great wines. What are you thinking? What are you preferring right now? For right now, which one I want to drink, right? I would say Dearberg first, Longoria comes a close second, but if I'm having dinner, I'm going for Ambulose. Okay, so all very good wines. It's great showing by the Santa Rita Hills estate venues, right? Anything else you want to add on these three? I think not just about producers, but when you are in Santa Barbara, it's so important that you always remember the vineyard because often we find ourselves being partial to a certain vineyard instead of just the producers. So it's important to follow the vineyard. And also if you are really hardcore Pinot Noir lover like me, look out for the clones. Understand each clone ask, ask the wine maker or the person in the tasting room, oh what clones are you using for each bottle? You start to see a lot of patterns. While you were talking, I was just drinking. I'm going to put the discount code for the Gabriel glass on the screen right now. You can get the standard glass, which is the machine blown or the alpha decanter. I want to let you know we are not affiliates. We don't get anything from it. It's just us from helping to provide you with something nice. Check out our Guide to the Wines of Santa Barbara, Sipping Santa Barbara. Check out these wines. I will put the links in the description box. These are three fantastic producers that you should be checking out. Years ago I found about Amphilus because they were actually on Wine Library TV. I'm Gary Vaynerchuk's show. So that's pretty cool. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember the episode. Guys, if you liked this video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel, Exotic Wine Travel. I will see you at the next episode.