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 this sale, the page you’re on right now, and we’ll get it to you at a cooler time of year (October)!
Want Protected Summer Shipping and don’t think heat will be a problem? Order from the sale linked here ! We’ll still try to get them to you with as little travel time as we can.
Some places get absurdly hot during the Summer, and in particularly unpleasant circumstances, it can damage a wine. Most people get theirs no problem, but there are a couple each Summer that fall victim to the sun no matter how fast we get them to you. If you’ve experienced that before or are afraid it’ll happen to you, we’ll hold your order for you until October, if you order from the Summer Hold sale. We are reasonably sure things will be cooler then.
