Serious Sonoma Coast Pinot at a Too-Low-to-Show Price!

As we have mentioned more than once, the wine market can yield many surprises. In California, deals can come from anywhere.  Why?  It’s a complex market and one that can be difficult to penetrate.  Because of that, some very good wines just don’t get the opportunity to shine, or sell through.  It’s a jungle out there, and it’s not easy to push a vintage of wine even if it’s exceptional and you don’t have a lot.

That brings us to the story of Dichotomy.  Why ‘Dichotomy’?  Well maybe because some of the other ‘thoughtful’ names, like Conundrum and Continuum, were taken.  Maybe it is truly a descriptive phrase for the struggle of the various winemaking and viticultural philosophies as they relate to the finished style of the wine (ooh, my head hurts). Ultimately, though, it’s about the juice.  That’s really the bottom line and there are a lot of ways to get to a specific point stylistically.

In the end this is a boutique label, and the ‘value’ label for a producer called Friedeman.  Like so many, Chicagoan Brooks Friedeman got bit by the wine bug.  But he took the plunge and actually came to California.  Dichotomy is the ‘workhorse’ while he labels his ‘small lot’ bottling under the Friedeman label.  As for the workhorse, how much market penetration can you achieve with 150 cases of wine?  Not that much even if you have the time to go out and work it really hard. 

So can you visit the Dichotomy winery?  Well, given the production levels, you can’t assume they have a winery.  Like so many labels, Dichotomy (and Friedeman) are a few barrels in a cooperative wine facility, the typical venue for a lot of tiny production startup wineries.  Also, some wineries prefer to sell in a controlled environment and often that means out-of-state where the competition isn’t as brutal.  We aren’t sure the case here, but when we called up the ‘find our wines’ list on their website, all of the addresses were in Illinois and Wyoming.  We can’t possibly comment on their ‘long term marketing plan’ or even if there is one.  But we can tell you that the Dichotomy Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast 2013 was well worth trying to tell this story.

As it played out, we got the call from a broker because they winery decided to move through the remainder of their 2013 Sonoma Coast bottling.  We had never heard of Dichotomy (and they probably never heard of us), perhaps because they did the majority of their ‘marketing’ out of state, and we have no idea why they were willing to deal on the last of their inventory.    We requested a sample and loved what we found in their Sonoma Coast bottling.   Pure, spicy, lots of persistent lifted cherry fruit with flecks of clove and cinnamon, but also with an engaging fleshiness that emerged with a few minutes in the glass, this was a delicious, and rather surprisingly accessible effort from the Sonoma Coast.  We bought the last 30 cases of what was only a 150 case production wine in the first place and asked no questions about why we could sell it for a substantial discount off its $32 retail price!

Our thinking was this.  The market is loaded with bright, classy, engaging California Pinot Noirs, but very few this good, with this kind of breeding and layers, at this kind of bottom-line price.  Certainly few had heard of this winery, and we couldn’t find any relevant press on this bottling (the ‘Russian River, which got a 91 from Wine Enthusiast, wasn’t even close to as interesting or nuanced as this Sonoma Coast).  We had never heard of Kosta Browne the first time we had that either, but we do know a steal when we see one.  This was surely a satisfying purchase for those that got it at its original fare ($32).  However, when you add the wine to your cart and proceed to checkout we have a surprise for you. That price goes even lower. How low? How about almost 40% off.  We can’t give you much in the way of winery history, except that they nailed this one.  While it lasts.