“My tasting at Radio-Coteau with Eric Sussman and Davida Ebner was among the highlights of my January trip to Sonoma. Often when producers make a wide range of wines, there are different levels of success throughout the range. Very few wineries excel at seemingly everything. Radio-Coteau is among them. Every wine is just spot-on. As always, the approach centers around sourcing fruit from a handful of top sustainably-farmed sites and working with minimal intervention in the cellar. That means indigenous fermentations, no SO2 until after malolactic fermentation and no racking until bottling. Eric Sussman told me he used a little less whole cluster in 2018 than 2017 because the stems were not quite as ripe and he did not want to push the stem character too much. In tasting, the 2018s have the signatures of a long cool growing season with no shocks, the most important being striking aromatic intensity and perfectly ripe tannins. The bottled 2017s turned out as I had expected and are among the most compelling wines of that year.”
–Antonio Galloni