2024 Occidental-Kistler Vineyards 'Freestone-Occidental' Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast

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 results speak for themselves. Jeb Dunnuck awarded this wine a 95pt review, and Antonio Galloni of Vinous blessed the 2024 Freestone-Occidental 93 points, awhile sibling Occidental bottlings have earned a perfect 100 points from Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW, a spot on Decanter's Top 50 US Wines list, and recognition among Wine Spectator's Top 10 Wines of the Year — proof that the Kistler magic didn't stay behind at the old winery. It just moved to the coast.