TN: 2010 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir Russian River Valley

• 2010 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir Russian River Valley - USA, California, Sonoma County, Russian River Valley (1/1/2021)
  Lazy rainy New Years day day wine, playing guitar, football in the background. Bottle decant for about 45, poured a glass and let that sit for 20 more. Dark garnet with shades of brick, quite opaque. Swirls lighter than it looks/feels. Nose is dark sour cherry, tobacco box, strawberry tops with the greens. The front is dark cherry, hints of cola, tart, acidity is higher side of medium and ebbs and flows from front to back. Tannins are still a bit gritty, felt more moving from front to mid. Finish is dark fruit, a touch of vanilla, and fades kinda flat yet lingers. It just feels a bit disjointed end-to-end… good fruit up front, acidity and tannins not all playing together at varying times and the finish loses the steam with a touch of heat. None of the notes all come together for a chord. Might be a drink younger and I missed the window wine or a better with food wine. That said, it has all the elements there, it just doesn’t come together consistently. Drink up and make the most of it, maybe others have better luck.

Posted from CellarTracker

I’m going to have to reconsider much of above. Due to my disappointment with the prior bottle, I opted to pop another and clear some space for more wine to come in. Well, this bottle was on another level than the one above. I bought the lot together and it has been stored under optimal conditions, these sat on top of each other a bin apart. I can’t explain it. The bottle I had tonight, which I did not take formal notes and now regret, showed stellar.

Without a full recap, I think the biggest difference was that it was superbly balanced and integrated. The tannins were more supple, the acidity piped in at all the right places, the fruit was complex and just mature. The finish was lingering and I did not get a sense of heat like last time. It just worked and nothing overpowered or failed to show up when you wanted/needed it.

So weird, and surprised, and its not often I get such variations in a bottle yet here I’m standing and just wondering WTF. I treated the first bottle with a ton of reverence as it was New Years; a decade old, and was really looking forward to it. Then it just showed not as much as I expected. Then this bottle a few months later, damn, what a difference. Was worth every penny and it over-delivered. Made up for the other, and I’ll reconsider my windows and expectations on the other 10s I’m sitting on.

I suppose it’s possible that elevated expectations played a role in the first one disappointing, and low expectations played a role in the second one impressing?

There’s probably more to it than that (bottle variation, maybe what you had eaten, how you were feeling, what mood you were in, things like that), but it did sort of jump out from your post, so I thought I’d lob it out there for consideration.

That all crossed my mind. My first recourse was to self-reflect and consider my impressions as suspect first. All said, that bottle is still fresh in my head as well. It was all disjointed, the tannins, the finish, all was what it was still now reflecting back. it does bother me. Don’t have a rationale explanation other than I maybe needed to let it sit longer; et.al other env prep things.

Your questions are spot on speculation, yet its still a material deviation IMO that foes not lend to that. The difference is that significant. This bottle was that good.

Rich, how sensitive are you to TCA? It sounds like the fruit might have been a bit muted on the first bottle, which would make the wine seem hotter. This is the type of thing that happens with a low-level TCA issue that is below one’s threshold.

Great question.

Now that you mention it, I am not that sensitive to it and I’m not mute to it either. That said, you raise a very interesting point that I had not even considered.

Strong possibility that is the case and just didn’t register for me causing it all to feel off. Can’t be 100% certain in hind sight, however that does provide the most plausible explanation.

I’ll keep that in mind for the future.

This requires one more bottle!

Tie breaker.

I’ve experienced a low volume of bottle variation from WS. I tasted through about 6 bottles of the 2010 Sonoma Coast a couple of years ago and thought they were aging very well.

I love it when someone posts about a wine I can grab and chime in on!

Last night, we decided to open this wine and try to help break the tie…

Opened at 6:19 pm and tasted to about 11 pm.

Good acidity, ‘upper medium,’ and the guy in the movie would say. Tart red fruit, piquant. I liked what was said about strawberry tops, we were debated any hint of cherry and ended up with a bit of raspberry. very very slight tobacco sensation on the nose that wandered off as the wine was open longer. We liked the fruit profile because it was not overtly fruit forward and not overly ‘ripe.’

I like paying attention to the finish on wines, this one finished top front of my palate and had a short back of palate finish. I think this fits its acidity.

We tasted this with Berserker Day Flannery burgers and the wine was enhanced with a touch of burger fattiness. It was a synergistic match. I would call this wine very ‘food responsive.’

As it had time to catch its breath, the wine became more and more vibrant, my wife was particularly taken by this evolution. She said “It opened fabulously! Surprisingly so!”

All in all, a thumbs up from me, my perfect wife, Nanny (her mom), and my elder son.

Then, my niece who lives with us, wandered in, and also a friend of mine who is staying with us and we decided the time was right to hit a second bottle.

We went back a few years from the first wine to get a general idea of the arc of aging these babies are on.

The 2002 Central Coast was a treat. It started off equally bright to the 2010, I would have guessed it to be younger than it is. It had a more mid-palate finish, and felt like it had a true medium acid presentation.

It had a longer finish than the 2010.

It had more straight up fruit identifiers. Just like Rich’s great description of strawberry tops in his note, we agreed to that with this wine. Quince and rhubarb also got mentions from the group.

There was some very faint ‘underground stone’ and cacao (but not cola) bit on the nose, which was very pleasant to catch within the fruit notes.

This wine happened after dinner, with about a 2 hour tasting span. It stood well on its own. (It went well with watching Queen Latifah [who I have a crush on] playing The Equalizer on her new show. Adam Goldberg is fun to watch, too. The plots are more broad than a Johnny Quest episode, but she is so cool it doesn’t matter.)

Thanks, Rich, for inspiring us across the digital expanse!