Converting People to Wine

We had an amazing day! The workshops were stellar. The blind tasting competition was intense. Charlotte Chippenfield and Rachel Voorhees were on the floor to guide the many palates who were focused on finding their favorite wines among the 42 finalists.

Thank you to all of the participating wineries. The Grand Awards tasting was awesome. Great wine and great food was shared with the crowd of over 500 wine lovers. We had to turn people away.

Complete Results of the 11th Annual Pinot Noir Shootout and Summit here

Pinot Noir, the most exciting, confounding, and challenging wine there is has been the focus of the Pinot Noir Shootout and Summit for 11 years. We never tire of tasting these wines, enjoying old friends and discovering new ones.

In this, the 11th Annual Pinot Noir Shootout, the Affairs of the Vine professional judging panel tasted over 460 Pinot Noirs from all over the globe. Many of the wines we taste continue to delight and fascinate us. Those will be noted here. Every year we find outstanding examples of Pinot Noir from wineries that we know and we’re often pleasantly surprised by wines submitted from producers new to us.

The Pinot Noir Shootout is the most comprehensive and focused tasting of Pinot Noir in the U.S. The judging panel, an incredibly diverse panel of 40 wine professionals, tasted 460+ wines over a three-month period. Just 32 wines are tasted by the experts per day, allowing the judges to be completely immersed, focused and fair to the wines. Palate fatigue is not a factor in our tastings. The wines are tasted completely blind without reference to appellation, vintage or price. Each wine submitted to the Pinot Noir Shootout was tasted a minimum of twice. The top rated wines were then tasted by our panel of experts at the Pinot Noir Shootout Finals on December28, 2011. Again, each judge was responsible for tasting, scoring, and analyzing only 32 wines.

Detailed notes accompany the scores of each judge. Gender counts…scores and comments are recorded separately and posted on the Affairs of the Vine website.

The Pinot Noir Shootout is the only wine competition in which the judges’ conclusions are put to the test by a large unbiased group of wine lovers. 42 of the top-rated wines were featured at The 11th Annual Pinot Noir Summit on March 16, 2013 at Herbst at the Presidio.

At the Summit, over 300 adventurous Pinot Noir lovers, seeking true splendor in the glass, experienced and evaluated the 42 luscious Pinot Noirs in a blind tasting at the Pinot Noir Summit. The 42 wines represented some of the best wines from this year’s Pinot Noir Shootout. An additional 200 people joined the festivities for the Grand Awards Tasting on Saturday evening.

In a distinctly different format and atmosphere from other wine-tasting events, the attendees blind tasted the wines and pitted their palates against the expert judging panel. The wines were divided into 2 groups of 21 wines each (the Black Group and the Silver Group). The wines were wrapped individually and identified by a random color. The male and female votes were tallied separately.

After tasting the wines blind, the Wine Lovers at The Pinot Summit were given 5 chips (red for the women and blue for the men) and were invited to cast their votes for their favorite wines with the chips provided. They could vote for as many as 5 wines or as few as one, indicating their passion for each wine by the number of chips they dropped in the “ballot box.”voted for their top three wines in order of preference after tasting them blind.

The Pinot Noir lovers spoke out loud and clear at the 11th Annual Pinot Noir Summit. In an unmistakable statement of preference, they embraced wines of elegance and varietal authenticity rather than burly Syrah-like Pinots, the muscular Pinot Noirs made popular by a few influential reviewers and their publications.

The Pinot Noir delegates agreed with the panel…the wines tasted were fantastic! The Pinot Noir Summit delegates however, did not rank the wines in the same order. Here are the winners as announced by Tom Cutts and Charlotte Chippenfield on Saturday night, March 16th at the Grand Awards Ceremony.

Female Wine Lovers
1st Place ~ ORCHID Canihan 2009 Canihan Family Vineyard Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast/Carneros $50.00
2nd Place ~ RED ~ Graton Ridge Cellars 2010 Paul Family Estate Pinot Noir, Russian River Valley $50.00
3rd Place ~ CRIMSON ~ Portalupi Wines 2010 Pinot Noir, Russian River Valley $30.00

Male Wine Lovers
1st Place ~ PERIWINKLE ~ J2 Winery 2010 Doctors Vineyard Pinot Noir, Santa Lucia Highlands $39.00
2nd Place ~ ORCHID ~ Canihan 2009 Canihan Family Vineyard Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast/Carneros
3rd Place ~ LIGHT BLUE ~ Double Bond 2007 Wolff Vineyards Pinot Noir, Edna Valley $65.00

Male Judges
1st Place ~ BLACK~ Field Stone 2011 Hopkins River Ranch Pinot Noir, Russian River Ranch $30.00
2nd Place ~ LIGHT BLUE Double Bond 2007 Wolff Vineyards Pinot Noir, Edna Valley $65.00
3rd Place ~ GRAY ~ Anderson Oaks 2010 Pinot Noir, Sonoma Coast $30.00