For my tastes, my top producers in CA:
Leaving out a ton of producers here that I love, but that’s a short list.
Interesting way of expressing it for Rhys. I have loved older and more recent bottlings, but it was very spotty 2009-2011. Rhys is also a little bit polarizing despite all the SCM fruit.
Any list will inevitably run up against stylistic preferences and which producers a given person has been exposed to. It’s not like we all buy and drink the same stuff, so the pool of potential top 10 contenders is different.
I would never put Rivers Marie or Mount Eden in my top 10. I have barely had either.
Interestingly the market agrees on SCM Pinot.
Per bottle purchase price*, 2011-2021 vintages.
69.98 Santa Cruz Mountains
64.56 Sonoma County
55.19 North Coast
53.96 San Francisco Bay
50.49 Central Coast
47.41 Napa / Sonoma (Carneros)
45.81 Napa Valley
27.75 California
*USD only
That is WILD!! What was your response (if you don’t mind me asking)?
I’m not trying to start or stop any particular argument but I haven’t had any issue of any kind with your level of experience as a wine taster and I haven’t had any disagreement with your support of the producers from Santa Cruz. I haven’t tasted as widely as you have in that region. I can say that many of my favorite California producers have come from SC, and I listed them among my favorites. Many of your other favorites are unfamiliar to me, I’ll keep an eye open and I appreciate you championing them.
I did admittedly throw a little gasoline on the fire with my comment about pricing. I apologize for my lack of tact. Again, my only point was that in my experience of buying high quality PN, I’ve always seen California priced much higher than Oregon. I’ve seen it that way for culty producers, I’ve seen it that way for regional cuvees, and I’ve seen it that way for single vineyards. If you’ve experienced the opposite, then I guess we’re living in two different worlds. Anyways, cheers
Before Sideways. SCM producers like the defunct Trout Gulch Vineyards were $20, many were $25, a few like Mount Eden were $35. Better Sonoma PNs were $35 to $45 (like Hirsch, W-S). Maybe a few hit $55? I remember seeing top Oregon producers in the $45-65 range. Of course, quite respectable daily drinkers were in the $20-25 range.
Things change. I saw OR PNs at $85 before anything I was aware of from CA hit that. I’d agree that’s largely flipped, with some CA PNs going crazy high in prices and wines that used to be $35 going for $65 or more now. And now, a bunch of the producers listed in the OR thread are ones I love, who charge a lot less than the big name hyped wineries, who generally don’t impress me. I’m seeing their prices going up over the last few years, with deserved market recognition, as are the worthy new wave of SCM producers. The basic Madson is $35, with the SVD I just checked $50. Alfaro Trout Gulch is $40. Sante Arcangeli Split Rail is about $50.
Just laughed it off. It was all straight Pinot. He was amazed by how dark and rich our 21s were and he sort of insinuated that it couldn’t have been possible without something like Syrah to boost the wines. It was more amusing than anything.
Arcadian
… obviously, haven’t tasted them all, but of the CA Pinots I’ve had, nothing has come remotely close — I’m talking lapping the field multiple times over. That said, there are many in this thread I’m adding to my queue.
Somehow I suspect Rhys pricing shifts that curve.
Absolutely. They represent a significant number of the purchases.
There are other ways I can slice this and I might do so later. SCM is the only one really skewed by a single producer.
Which is more expensive?? Most of us have taken a statistics class and know how difficult that question would be to answer properly. What a data base you would need!! I would say that ten years ago Oregonians were stuck at lower MSRP. This was a problem for them because a lot of their sales were through the three tier system. Clearly people are paying a lot more for top Oregon Pinots than they did back then.
Skewing the results are wineries like Rhys and Marcassin, whose wines are primarily sold DTC, but are sometimes resold retail for even more. Another problem is that many California wineries have one or two wines that sell for three digits while most of their wines are priced well below that.
I pulled this from CellarTracker purchase data. Are there biases and issues in this? Yes. There are deeper analyses I could do. I might later - this is mostly me learning to develop some new skills and use some new tools as well as what I can do fairly quickly.
I did the OR vs CA with average/median/mode to handle the outliers better and the results were consistent. I didn’t for the regions of CA and definitely Rhys pushes the results higher for SCM because of the high intersection of CT users and Rhys purchasers. I can normalize this at some point. Marcassin is a relative tiny factor.
Andrew,
What you are doing could be labelled a thankless task, so I am thanking you.
Several comments:
The Santa cruz Mountain area really doesn’t produce that much wine. Outside of Ridge–very little PN–none of the wineries is really that big, compared to wineries like Au Bon Climat, Wms Selyem, etc. Indeed I bet the Bien Nacido vineyard produces more wine in toto than the whole of the SC Mtns. David bruce seems to be making wines from outside the region. Ditto Testarossa.
It would be interesting to see a price breakdown of Russian River and Sonoma Coast appellations.
I bet the most expensive Pinots in California come from either the Santa Rita hills or the True Sonoma Coast.
But I don’t know.
After you are done with that you could break down results in Oregon by subregion…I am betting on the red hills of Dundee.
My pleasure. This is training wheels for me so I am glad to do it. Teaches me a lot on both learning queries and the details of CT data (eg I forgot to limit currency and got insane valuations on some other queries. Lol.)
Excluding Rhys dropped it to 46.25. So we really see an outsized effect.
Note - this data is based on the label AVA, not winery location.
Inside Sonoma County (not including Carneros)
88.40 Fort Ross - Seaview
68.49 Sonoma Coast
63.49 Sonoma Valley
61.92 Russian River Valley
(SRH would be here at 59.23 - I will do other areas a different time)
57.75 Green Valley of Russian River Valley
55.21 Petaluma Gap
50.70 Sonoma Mountain
46.58 Bennett Valley
36.40 Sonoma County
NB - 2011-2021 vintages, USD only, 750ml only, red Pinot only
Oregon here just to not pollute that thread w/ pricing 
63.95 Ribbon Ridge
58.71 Dundee Hills
57.84 Laurelwood District
52.07 Eola - Amity Hills
49.61 Yamhill-Carlton
46.46 Chehalem Mountains
42.69 McMinnville
40.49 Willamette Valley
Super interesting. Would be cool to see this adjusted for production levels.
For instance if you looked at our pricing on our 2022 Freedom Hill bottlings you would get an average of $67.66. This is based on 6 wines priced at 37, 48, 48, 48, 75 and 150. However, adjusting for production levels you get $47.80 since the two smallest bottlings are the most expensive and the least expensive has just under 50% of the total production of all the bottlings combined. I realize there isn’t a way to realistically do this with a general spread of bottlings over many producers. Would be interesting to see how some small bottlings are altering the overall pricing structure.
I ran this based on per bottle purchases (750ml only), so the production level is theoretically contained there. ie more bottles produced = more purchases. I suspect though given the nature of the CellarTracker users, there is a bias toward higher end wines from any producer.
I’d need production numbers to normalize this.
That’s what I would assume and I think your instincts are correct (people more inclined to catalog and write about more expensive wines). I’m sure obtaining all the necessary data to normalize for inventory levels is basically impossible.
Excellent work, Andrew!
Got my order in with Jamie on Kutch PNs… Thanks Frank for helping.
Shout out to @Jamie_Kutch , thank you and can’t wait to try your wine!!
In no order…
Pisoni Estate
Calera
Au Bon Climat
Occidental
William Selyem
Littorai
Martinelli
Arista
Rhys
Mondavi Reserve (special place in my heart)