Luckiest Plaque In The Valley
TASTING NOTES: “Cherries, raspberries, red roses, supple, baking spices, savoriness, finesse, and classy French oak.” (AbV 13.6%, pH 3.58, TA 5.3 g/L)
VARIETALS: Pinot Noir
BARRELS: Not specified.
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Hopkins Ranch.
Ranches have names. This feels natural to us now — the Ponderosa, the Flying W, the Double Diamond — but there’s a whole genre of deeply serious scholarship dedicated to why humans name land at all. Not buildings, not roads, but tracts of land we happen to own for a while . The prevailing theory is something called “landmark salience,” the idea that names help people navigate, coordinate, and remember. Sure. Reasonable. But there’s a competing explanation that I find more convincing, which is that people name things because they love them, and naming is how you tell something you love it when it can’t hear you.
Which brings me to the Hopkins in question. There are roughly 47,000 people in the United States with the last name Hopkins — a patronymic derived from “Hopkin,” itself a diminutive of “Robert” filtered through medieval Welsh pronunciation habits. (English names are a long game of telephone played over eight centuries.) One of those Hopkinses apparently owns, or owned, or at some point cultivated, an 80-plus-year-old organic farm in Russian River Valley, and their name is now on a bottle of Pinot Noir. That’s not a small thing. Most of us will be lucky to get a plaque on a park bench.
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ICYMI, you have two choices:
Worried Summer heat might get to your wine before your wine gets to you? Order from the sale linked here, and we’ll get it to you at a cooler time of year !
Want it shipped now? Every package during the summer will have protected temp control ground shipping for much of the country that takes longer but will ensure safe delivery. Expect up to two weeks for delivery. Now through the September 12th offer.
