Joel Gott California Pinot Noir California Red Wine

Joel Gott Wines says Joel Gott started the company in 1996. The grape to sort out is Pinot Noir, a red with relatively thin skins. Category guides for it commonly describe red cherry, berry and plum, and call Pinot Noir lighter in color and lower in tannin than Cabernet Sauvignon, with site and ripeness able to shift it from bright and delicate to darker and fuller. The fruit comes from California.

We do not have a shopper rating for this wine. Across the stores we checked in September 2026, the price fell between $18.49 and $18.99.

Joel Gott's technical sheet for the current 2023 vintage narrows the state-wide California label to two specific sources: fruit from the marine-cooled Santa Lucia Highlands in Monterey and the Sta. Rita Hills appellation, plus warmer, sunnier vineyards inland in Santa Barbara County. The producer ferments the wine in open-top vessels to hold onto fruit character and tannin structure, then ages it partly in French oak, 20 percent new wood and another 30 percent one to three years old, with the finished wine at 13.9 percent alcohol. The producer notes the 2023 growing season ran long and mild until a late-summer heatwave pushed harvest earlier than usual, yielding smaller, more concentrated clusters. James Suckling scored the wine 91 points, the one outside rating on the producer's page.

Our call: a reasonable pick if a single strong critic score and a specific two-region sourcing story are enough for you; James Suckling's 91 points and the producer's account of marine-cooled Monterey fruit blended with warmer Santa Barbara fruit both back a Pinot Noir aimed at some complexity. Pass if you want shopper opinion behind the bottle too; no shopper rating has reached our record yet, so the case here runs through the critic and the producer alone.

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