The 2016 Alesia Pinot Noir Anderson Valley is unabashedly delicious, bursting with fragrant aromas of dried flowers, raspberries, wild plums and sweet forest floor. On the palate, the wine is medium-bodied, supple and satiny, with a juicy core of succulent, mouthwatering fruit that's framed by melting tannins. This bottling is already expressive, and I'd expect it to drink well for a decade, perhaps more. Note that this vintage hails entirely from Kevin Harvey's Bearwallow Vineyard.

A distinctly airy, floral and very pretty nose offers up mostly aromas from the red side of the fruit spectrum introduces delicious, refined and well-detailed middle weight flavors that possess a lovely sense of underlying tension that also suffuses the dusty and mildly austere finale that is fairly tightly wound but not so much that this couldn't be enjoyed after a few years of cellaring. I like the delivery and this should age well.

The Pinot Noirs start with the 2016 Pinot Noir Anderson Valley Alesia, which comes all from the Bearwallow Vineyard in Anderson Valley. Offering up a darker style in its pomegranate, cherries, leafy herbs, and underbrush aromatics, it’s medium-bodied, has plenty of density and oomph on the palate, ripe tannins, and a great finish. It’s a great introduction into the wines of this estate.

The 2016 Pinot Noir “Anderson Valley” bottling from Alesia is really a lovely bottle, offering up bright, sappy fruit, coupled to excellent soil tones on both the nose and palate. The classy bouquet offers up scents of black cherries, pomegranate, a touch of cola, fresh herb tones, woodsmoke and a fine signature of dark soil elements. On the palate the wine is pure, full-bodied, focused and nicely plump at the core, with lovely focus and grip and impressive inner tension on the long and nascently complex finish. This is made from younger vine fruit in the estate vineyards now and shows the lightness of step of all the Rhys pinots and is quite refined in its octane, coming in at 12.9 percent. Fine, fine juice.