You can’t talk about RAEN’s “Royal St. Robert” Pinot Noir without mentioning Robert Mondavi, the California wine legend for whom this cuvée is named. The brothers behind RAEN, Carlo and Dante Mondavi, are Robert’s grandsons, and more than anything else, they inherited from him an unwavering belief in the greatness of California wine—and California’s terroir.
And while Robert Mondavi is most readily associated with Cabernet Sauvignon that rivaled (and often eclipsed) Bordeaux’s best, Carlo and Dante are gunning for the greats of Burgundy with their gorgeously perfumed Chambolle-like Pinot Noirs from the extreme Sonoma Coast. Every time I serve this wine blind to someone they think it’s top-tier Burgundy, and I understand why. RAEN is very serious, very ambitious wine that has ascended to the elite ranks very quickly, and for all the right reasons: Far from being a mass-market brand, RAEN is all about meticulous, sustainable viticulture and resolutely natural, small-batch production. It’s the same kind of rapturous devotion to “site”—i.e. the unique qualities of a specific vineyard, and the nuances it imparts to Pinot Noir—you see at the great family-run domaines of Burgundy. In previous RAEN offers, I marveled at the precocity of these relative “upstarts,” but with the release of their 2018’s, which received a torrent of acclaim in the press, I see a winery that has truly come into its own. It helps that they chose the Sonoma Coast, arguably California’s greatest source of true “cool-climate” Pinot Noir, to plant their flag, and they’ll be the first ones to tell you that: Don’t focus on the famous surname, focus on the trio of perfectly situated vineyards, all of them mere miles from the Pacific Ocean and farmed with fanatical care. The bar was high from the outset, but this ’18 raises it nonetheless—it’s as finely crafted and beautifully perfumed as Pinot Noir gets, period. What a wine!