97 points, Decanter

Stately and emphatic, the 2020 Rim Rock leads with a focused nose of violets, lavender, sage, spice, incense, and wild blackberries. The palate underscores the wine’s focus with concentration and a gratifying combination of fruit purity and elegant tannins. Like past vintages of Rim Rock, the very detailed nose and sense of poise and energy characterizes the wine, but the 2020 vintage offers more concentration and a generous texture on the palate at an earlier stage.

The 2020 Syrah Rim Rock Vineyard was vinified using about one-third whole clusters. It has a medium ruby-purple color and broody aromas of blackcurrants, grilled meats, coffee beans, bitter chocolate and mint. The full-bodied palate offers concentrated, powerful fruit, loads of powdery tannins and sparks of juicy acidity that highlight floral perfume on the long finish.

Piedrasassi is the family and personal project of Sashi Moorman and his wife Melissa Sorongon. A unique winery-bakery where they grow grapes and grains on the central coast of California. Sashi has been growing Syrah, the main variety with which they make their cuvées, for more than twenty years. The vines are planted in the transverse valleys that run from east to west, in a place of great tectonic unrest, where the soils mix and change continuously. The slopes receive the cool breeze from the Pacific and a deep fog that favors an ideal microclimate for the cultivation of syrah. In the winery they try to express each vineyard and each vintage to the maximum with minimal intervention. Vinifications are carried out with native yeasts, without temperature control and are normally made with the whole bunch. The aging takes place in large used barrels and is bottled with minimal doses of sulfur, without clarifying or filtering.”…bold and dynamic in the glass.