2023 Occidental Cuvee Elizabeth Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast 6pk 6x750ml

Before there was Occidental, there was Kistler Vineyards — the winery Steve Kistler founded in 1978 and built, over nearly four decades, into one of the most revered names in American wine. Kistler's Chardonnays became the benchmark for the "wines of site" movement in California, earning Wine Spectator's "Chardonnay of the Year" award in back-to-back years for the Durell Vineyard bottling, and were famously named "Best of the Best" among "Star Producers" by Food & Wine Magazine. Bottles from the Kistler Vineyards portfolio have collected some of the highest scores ever given to American Chardonnay — including a 98-point Wine Spectator score for the Vine Hill Vineyard bottling, which landed at #6 on Wine Spectator's Top 100 Wines of the Year — and the label remains, to this day, one of the most sought-after mailing-list allocations in the country. Steve ran that program almost single-handedly for close to forty years before stepping away in 2017 to devote himself fully to a new, singular obsession: Pinot Noir.

That obsession became Occidental, an entirely separate estate built from the ground up on the wind-scoured coastal ridges above Freestone and Occidental. Today Steve farms alongside his daughter Catherine Kistler, now the estate's second-generation winemaker, who has stepped fully into the role of shaping Occidental's wines and its future. Together they oversee just 65 dry-farmed, own-rooted acres, planted with proprietary massale selections Steve developed over thirty years of vineyard work — vine material found nowhere else, matched block by block to these singular coastal sites.

The winemaking philosophy is the same discipline that made the Kistler name legendary in the first place: every wine is fermented with native yeasts and native malolactic bacteria, hand-sorted, and made entirely from free-run juice, with zero shortcuts across the range.

The Bodega Headlands and Bodega Ridge properties, first developed in 1999, now produce two ridgetop vineyard-designated Pinots overlooking the ocean.

Cuvee Elizabeth comes from the Bodega Headlands Vineyard, the same fruit once bottled under the Kistler label. This is West Sonoma Coast terroir at its most expressive — high-pitched, mineral-driven Pinot that manages richness without weight, the coastal signature written in salt and stone.

The 2023 growing season was cool and drawn-out, with tiny yields that produced a rich, textured Pinot at relatively low sugar levels — the kind of ripeness only cold-climate sites deliver. The wine is crystalline and racy, with blue-toned fruit, lavender, and exotic spice building into a layered, seductive wine that Antonio Galloni at Vinous scored 97 points.

In the glass: hints of lavender and blue fruit, blackberry and plum, with strawberries, orange peel, and a citrusy saline finish. Full-bodied but precise, with bright acidity and the kind of concentration that doesn't announce itself with weight. This is Pinot that rewards patience — decant it now or cellar it a decade and watch the secondary complexity unfold.