🏷️ Lot Overview
Region: Santa Lucia Highlands
Vintage: 2024
Blend: 100% Gamay Noir
ChatGPT Original Source Guess: Jolie-Laide Wines (alt: Arnot-Roberts)
Wine Berserkers Guess: Copper Six
Alcohol: 13.4%
Oak Aging: 100% neutral French oak
Cam Price: $12.42 ($149/case)
Retail Estimate: ~$50
Drink Window: 2025–2032
🍷 Cameron’s Release Notes
Dear Friends,
First of all, a bright and cheerful Happy New Year to you all! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!
On offer today is one of my best finds, a total gem of a wine produced to the highest standards in one of Sonoma County’s finest custom crush facilities. It hails from the same producer as Lot 37 Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon and is produced with all the attention to detail required to make a world-class Gamay Noir scoring in the mid-90’s.
Lot 52 2024 Santa Lucia Highlands Gamay Noir is dynamic, lively, and, I promise, quite compelling should this style appeal to you. Broadly appealing, fruit-forward and approachable now, but also remarkably complex and extremely well-built (super silky!). Everything you would expect from one of the top single-vineyard, $50/bottle, mid-90’s scoring Gamay Noirs produced here in California.
As you can imagine, this is produced in tiny quantities — just 90 cases for this first tranche. I highly recommend you check it out.
Website / Tasting Notes
For the unfamiliar, Gamay Noir is the foundational grape of Beaujolais, but what you have here is much closer to upper-Cru Beaujolais, where the grape is treated more like Burgundian Pinot Noir.
Structurally and weight-wise, Gamay lands somewhere between Pinot Noir and Southern Rhône Syrah/Grenache, but can be exceptionally complex — as is the case with Lot 52.
Sourced directly out of a single-vineyard, $50/bottle program bottling blend, this is one of the finest Gamay Noirs produced in California. Previous vintages (from a different vineyard but the same producer) have scored in the mid-90’s.
While the fruit was sourced from Santa Lucia Highlands, the wine was produced in Sonoma County at a high-end custom crush facility, fermented in open-top tanks and aged entirely in neutral French oak to preserve its vibrant fruit and lively character.
Vibrant purple-magenta in the glass, it offers a fantastically enticing bouquet of blackberry, raspberry and black cherry fruit interwoven with clove spice and lilac perfume, kissed with red river clay and tobacco. Liquid silk on the palate, with more structure than Pinot Noir, delivering cranberry, pomegranate and black cherry through a long, luscious finish.
100% Santa Lucia Highlands Gamay Noir
100% Single Vineyard
100% neutral French oak
13.4% alc.
TA 5.82 g/L | pH 3.41
~90 cases (Tranche One)
🧠ChatGPT says:
🔍 Source Guess: Jolie-Laide Wines (strongest fit)
Alt: Arnot-Roberts
🎯 Rationale:
The strongest clue is stylistic and operational rather than geographic. Santa Lucia Highlands Gamay Noir at a $50 price point with consistent mid-90s scores is an extremely narrow lane in California.
Jolie-Laide has been the most visible and critically successful California producer of serious Gamay Noir, routinely scoring mid-90s, working with Santa Lucia Highlands fruit, and vinifying in Sonoma County custom crush facilities using open-top fermenters and neutral oak.
The language around “upper Cru Beaujolais,” “liquid silk,” lifted florals, and savory earth strongly matches Jolie-Laide’s house style — elegant, energetic, fruit-forward but serious.
The fact that this comes from the same producer as Lot 37 (a structured, classically built Alexander Valley Cabernet) also aligns with Jolie-Laide’s broader portfolio, which spans Gamay, Syrah, Pinot, and Cabernet from top sites.
Arnot-Roberts is the best alternative stylistically, but they rarely release Gamay in this quantity and are less likely to part with finished single-vineyard bottling blends.
⏳ Drink Window ⌛
Best Enjoyed: 2025–2030
Sweet Spot: 2026–2029
Why: Bright fruit and silky texture make it lovely young, but the structure, acidity, and neutral oak give it real Cru-Beaujolais-like aging potential. By the late 2020s it should gain savory depth without losing freshness.