Tobacco Road Cellars is a boutique winery dedicated to producing a limited supply of high-quality Pinot Noir, Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon from the beautiful California region. This narrow focus combines great vineyard partners and a world class winemaking team to create premier hand-crafted wines. Our wines exemplify our philosophy of hand picking, sorting and pressing; we believe these processes give our wines immense richness, maturity and drinkability.
The 2006 growing season gave us heavy rains in the spring, putting our vines behind schedule and threatened the size of the crop at Amber Ridge Vineyard. But warm, dry weather soon followed, allowing the vines to catch up. The July heat spell was another threat, with temperatures reaching as high as 115 degrees and anytime the temperature reaches beyond 95 degrees, the vine shuts down. Thanks to quality vineyard management our vines were able to survive the heat quite nicely because of those spring rains. "The challenge was really to hold down the growth of the vines," winemaker Michael Zitzlaff says. "The vines this year wanted to keep growing because they had a lot of water and the heat wave ended up being a real blessing. The heat wave put things back in balance."
Located in the heart of Russian River, Amber Ridge was planted to three Dijon clones (115, 667, 777) in 2000 on gently sloping hill. The typical weather pattern in Russian River is fog until at least 11 in the morning. Then it breaks off, warms up and then the fog starts to come in again around 4 or 5 which cools down the valley. As fall approached we began harvesting clone 777 on September 28th, clone 667 on October 7th and 115 on October 15th at an average of 25.9 brix.
Another fun, exciting and challenging harvest for Tobacco Road. Today, we are happy to offer our 2006 Pinot Noir Russian River Valley from Amber Ridge Vineyard. It is our hope that you will enjoy sharing these wines with your friends and family as much as we do. Wine lovers know-finding unique, limited-production wine is the best excuse to gather together, share a nice bottle or two, and explore the stories of the wine and each other.
The 2006 growing season gave us heavy rains in the spring, putting our vines behind schedule and threatened the size of the crop at Amber Ridge Vineyard. But warm, dry weather soon followed, allowing the vines to catch up. The July heat spell was another threat, with temperatures reaching as high as 115 degrees and anytime the temperature reaches beyond 95 degrees, the vine shuts down. Thanks to quality vineyard management our vines were able to survive the heat quite nicely because of those spring rains. "The challenge was really to hold down the growth of the vines," winemaker Michael Zitzlaff says. "The vines this year wanted to keep growing because they had a lot of water and the heat wave ended up being a real blessing. The heat wave put things back in balance."
Located in the heart of Russian River, Amber Ridge was planted to three Dijon clones (115, 667, 777) in 2000 on gently sloping hill. The typical weather pattern in Russian River is fog until at least 11 in the morning. Then it breaks off, warms up and then the fog starts to come in again around 4 or 5 which cools down the valley. As fall approached we began harvesting clone 777 on September 28th, clone 667 on October 7th and 115 on October 15th at an average of 25.9 brix.
Another fun, exciting and challenging harvest for Tobacco Road. Today, we are happy to offer our 2006 Pinot Noir Russian River Valley from Amber Ridge Vineyard. It is our hope that you will enjoy sharing these wines with your friends and family as much as we do. Wine lovers know-finding unique, limited-production wine is the best excuse to gather together, share a nice bottle or two, and explore the stories of the wine and each other.
