In 2023, Jackson Family Wines’ La Crema label became the third winery ever to receive Wine Spectator’s award for Wine Value of the Year. This year, at the 2024 New York Wine Experience, La Crema’s chief winemaker, Craig McAllister, took to the stage to explain how it’s possible to make a high-scoring nationally available wine at only $28, and what makes the winery’s 2021 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir so special.
“It’s a 24/7 project to get this wine from the vineyard into the bottle and then into the hands of the consumer,” said McAllister. In a world where top-notch Pinot Noir from California has become increasingly exclusive in price and production size, McAllister credits La Crema’s ability to produce quality wine in great quantity to the fact that his team harvests and blends from vineyards across Sonoma County’s many AVAs.
La Crema has a decades-long history of bringing well-crafted Pinot Noirs to the budget-conscious connoisseur. Bought by titans of California winemaking Jess Jackson and Barbara Banke in 1993, when it was still called La Crema Viñera, the project was always one of scale and accessibility, with even their more elite single-vineyard bottlings always priced less than $100.
Jackson Family Wines’ vast landholdings across Sonoma County allow La Crema’s bottlings to include grapes from Pinot Noir’s top subregions, such as Los Carneros and the Russian River Valley as well as from the Sonoma Coast AVA itself, closest to the ocean. “La Crema’s Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir comes from 43 different vineyards, with 342 individual plots within those vineyards. This gives us about 400 individual ferments that we incorporate into the barrel,” explains McAllister.
But it was also their choice to harvest and press earlier that brought success for the 2021 bottling, McAllister says. “The 2021 was pressed two weeks earlier than usual, and I think that turned out to be a very, very good thing.
“We know the attributes of Pinot Noir that everyone loves; that it’s delicate, that it has lovely fruit notes, and so the picking and pressing being a bit earlier that year gave us the chance to preserve the delicate aromatics and flavors that ultimately led to this particularly successful blend.”
