Flowers Winery Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir

Pinot Noir is a thin-skinned red grape. Our grape research notes it goes into still red wines and also into many sparkling wines. We do not have a shopper rating for this wine. The category guides it draws on tend to point to red cherry, berry and plum, to a paler color and to less tannin than a Cabernet Sauvignon; if you are weighing it against a Cabernet on the shelf, that is the contrast those guides describe, and they add that site and ripeness can move a Pinot Noir from bright and delicate to dark and full.

Flowers Vineyards and Winery says its flagship Camp Meeting Ridge vineyard, north of Jenner on the Sonoma Coast, was first planted in 1991. The wine is labeled Sonoma Coast, and across three stores our September 2026 checks ranged from $59.99 to $72.99.

Flowers' own listing for the current 2024 vintage carries a 95-point score from Courtney Humiston for James Suckling, who called it “medium- to full-bodied with fresh acidity and plush tannins”, citing aromas and flavors of “crunchy red cherries, blackberry bramble and dried rose petals”, and adding that with time, “savory elements of bay laurel, anise and spiced black cherry begin to show”. The producer's own tasting note describes “a through line of minerality” opening the wine, layered with “blue fruit, fresh herbs, and new redwood tips”, the winery's words.

Flowers farms two estate vineyards on this stretch of coast: Camp Meeting Ridge, planted in 1991 about two miles from the Pacific at nearly 1,500 feet, and Sea View Ridge, planted in 1998 closer still to the water. The winery says both are farmed organically and biodynamically, and that the ridgeline sites sit above the fog line, catching sunshine while ocean breezes keep temperatures cool. This Sonoma Coast bottling is the estate's broader appellation wine, positioned below its single-vineyard Camp Meeting Ridge and Sea View Ridge labels.

Our call: buy it if an outside critic's score does the convincing; the current vintage carries a 95-point rating from James Suckling's Courtney Humiston, and the fruit comes from an estate that has farmed this stretch of the far Sonoma Coast organically and biodynamically since Camp Meeting Ridge went into the ground in 1991. Pass if you want a shopper record behind that number too; no rating from our shoppers has reached us, and at this price, one outside critic is carrying real weight.

The Grocery Store Wine Desk · written Sep 16, 2026 from our research file for this wine. Numbers reflect our latest checks.