2024 Flowers Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir

If you love elegant, red-fruited Pinot Noir — think the lifted spice and silky finesse of village-level Burgundy with a touch more California sunshine — this is one of the benchmarks. Flowers was named a 2025 Wine Enthusiast American Winery of the Year finalist — one of only five wineries in the country to make the list.

Walt and Joan Flowers founded the estate in 1989, when almost nobody believed you could grow great Pinot two miles from the Pacific Ocean. Only Hirsch and Bohan were out there. Today, the area has a name — the "extreme Sonoma Coast" — and Flowers is its founding family. Their estate vineyards, Camp Meeting Ridge and Sea View Ridge, sit on wild, windswept ridges between 1,150 and 1,875 feet, just above the marine fog layer. Plantings within the entire Fort Ross-Seaview AVA make up only 2% of its total acreage. This is some of the rarest, hardest-won Pinot terroir in California.

The pedigree runs deep. Wine Enthusiast calls Flowers a "training ground" for some of California's most legendary cool-climate winemakers — Steve Kistler, Ross Cobb, Greg La Follette, and Hugh Chapelle all passed through. Today the estate is owned by the Huneeus family (Quintessa, Faust), with Chantal Forthun leading the winemaking since 2012.

The Sonoma Coast bottling is the house calling card: fruit from cool, fog-swept coastal sites, native yeast fermentation and a light hand in the cellar, so the place does the talking. Pinot that tastes like a place, not a recipe.