The Hilt Estate Pinot Noir 2023

In 2004, Matt Dees started making wine at Jonata, learning to work the Rhône and Bordeaux grapes of the Santa Ynez Valley under an operation owned by Stan Kroenke, who also happens to own Screaming Eagle up in Napa. By 2008, Dees wanted something else — a Burgundian counterpart to everything he was doing at Jonata — and that is the year The Hilt was born. It took him another six years to find the ground he wanted: In 2014, the operation bought Rancho Salsipuedes, a stretch of the Sta. Rita Hills near Lompoc holding three vineyards — Bentrock, Radian and Puerta del Mar — that would become the foundation of what The Hilt is today.

Here is the detail I love most. Dees had the land in 2014. He did not release a single-vineyard wine from it until 2018. Four years of walking those three vineyards, tasting the differences block by block, before he trusted himself to say which one was which. The Estate Pinot Noir is what came before that patience paid off — his considered opinion of what Bentrock, Radian and Puerta del Mar could become together instead of separately.

So what is in the glass? The 2023 opens with cherry, dark chocolate and a thread of anise, and it keeps getting darker and more serious as it goes — more chocolate, a little vanilla, cacao, cinnamon, a savory edge somewhere between dried porcini and sweet tobacco. It is silky rather than heavy, restrained rather than showy, and it has the one quality that separates good modern Pinot Noir from the merely fashionable: real power held firmly in reserve instead of dumped into the glass all at once. This is not a first-30-seconds Pinot. It gets more interesting the longer you sit with it.

If your reference point for great Pinot Noir has always been Burgundy, or if you have been quietly unimpressed by most of what passes for serious California Pinot, this is the bottle I would hand you to reconsider that position. Matt Dees has spent two decades — first at Jonata, then here — proving he understands restraint as well as he understands ripeness, and this Estate bottling is the clearest evidence of that I have tasted from him yet.

Now, the part I actually get excited about. This wine usually sells for about $80 a bottle. Terroir Club membership is $25. That is a ridiculous gap, and it is not an accident. This is exactly the kind of bottle I want the club to deliver now and then: a wine I believe in enough to let the club absorb the difference, so you get to drink something far more serious, far more expensive and far better than the price in front of you would suggest.