Each year we recognize some of our Operatives favorite wines of the year, along with some of our own Agent favorites. Today’s wine earned the Operative’s Choice Award for Top Value Priced Pinot Noir of 2018. This wine is offered to you today at a new, lower price. These are the final cases of this wine on the planet and at 60% off, we expect this wine to sell out.

Please visit soon to reserve yours.

This is what we had to say about this wine the last time we featured it, earlier this year:

You won’t find a better price on today’s superb wine!

Today’s wine steal is the delicious, elegant, and award-winning Wild Horse Winery and Vineyards 2013 “Cheval Sauvage” Santa Maria Valley Pinot Noir. Wild Horse’s Cheval Sauvage is the winery’s flagship Pinot Noir. It just doesn’t get any better than this balanced beauty of a wine.

About the wine:

This Pinot-Noir has medium-light density with a garnet coloration that is very consistent from edge to edge. The nose is aromatic with a bouquet of cherry, dried cranberry, rich new leather, desiccated violets, and holiday spices. The palate is full of barrel tannin flavor of vanilla, butterscotch, and gingerbread spice, with fruit components of cherry compote and fig. Cheval Sauvage is a well-balanced Pinot that brings the peppy acidity into harmony with soft glycerin content. Simply smooth from start to finish. This would stand up well to a nuanced and robust dish such as chicken cacciatore.

Wild Horse has been making wine since the early ’80s. Their reputation for quality - and high-scoring wines - is unrivaled in Santa Barbara County’s Santa Maria Valley.

Santa Barbara County’s Pinot Noir may have become famous by the movie Sideways, but the tradition of wine growing and winemaking dates back to the Spanish missionaries but after prohibition, many of the vines disappeared. In the early 1970s, vines began to reappear and in just a few years, however unlikely, the region began to develop a reputation for producing exceptional Burgundian varietals challenging Oregon and New Zealand in the production of exceptional Pinot Noir.

The Santa Maria Valley and Santa Ynez Valley where the fruit for this wine was sourced, have maritime climates influenced and tempered by the Pacific Ocean and soils of sand and clay loam which suits Pinot Noir exceptionally well.

Here’s what the wine press has to say.

92 points, Wine Spectator - “A refined red, with a silky mouthfeel and flavors of cherry, plum tart and dried currant that are creamy and plush. The spicy finish is pure-tasting and filled with lively minerality. Drink now through 2022. Tasted twice, with consistent notes.

93 points, Wine Enthusiast - “Mulberry, cherry, iron, raw beef and roasted pork aromas make for a gamy entry to this bottling, which also shows bay leaf and sage on the nose. Those sagebrush qualities are strong on the palate, which is reminiscent of an Asian-spiced meat dish, with rhubarb and pomegranate lending freshness..