Winemaker Notes
Abundantly aromatic, the wine opens with ripe cranberry, marmalade, white pepper, fresh brioche, dried sage, camphor and Mediterranean coastal trail. The entry is silky with a flood of bing cherry galette, Madagascar vanilla and ripe red fruits. Seamless, integrated and elegantly opulent, the wine finishes gracefully with trace amounts of soft, oak tannin. About the Label Sometimes the labels take years to develop and sometimes they happen quickly. Inspiration comes from a variety of places and things, even duct tape and cardboard.
Robert Parker 91 Points
About Orin Swift
The history of Orin Swift Cellars dates back to 1995 when on a lark, David Swift Phinney took a friend up on an offer and went to Florence, Italy to spend a semester “studying”. During that time, he was introduced to wine, how it was made, and got hooked. A few more years of university led to graduation and eventually a job at Robert Mondavi Winery in 1997 as a temporary harvest worker. Deciding that if he was going to work this hard, it would eventually have to be for himself, he founded Orin Swift Cellars in 1998; Orin is his father’s middle name and Swift is his mother’s maiden name. With two tons of zinfandel and not much else, he spent the next decade making wine for others as well as himself and grew the brand to what it is today.
About the Slander Label
Having troubled and toiled for a decade to make a Pinot Noir worth bottling, Phinney finally got his recipe right in 2015 after learning the importance of picking the finicky grape at exactly the right moment of ripeness (in this case 25 brix) before it ends up tasting like strawberry jam.
The label is one of the simplest in the Orin Swift range, and is meant to look like a piece of duct tape wrapped around the bottle in a nod to labelling barrel and tank samples when he first started out.
“Two things you always have in a winery are duct tape and marker pens… and cold beer,” Phinney jokes. He works with Pinot from the Santa Rita Hills in Santa Barbara and the Sonoma Coast.
