Description
FUTURES PRICING (shipping fall 2026)
6 bottles – $42 a bottle plus shipping (use code Ess6)
12 bottles – $32 a bottle continental USA shipping included (use code Ess12)
24 bottles – $24 a bottle continental USA shipping included (use code Ess24)
Why Make This Wine? When I started Clarice Wine Company in 2017, I did so with a very different vision for Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir than the one I had embraced earlier in my career. That evolution came largely from what I had witnessed in the vineyards over the previous two decades. I was no longer working with young vines whose roots barely stretched a few feet into the ground. These vines had matured. Their roots now reached deep into the soils of the Santa Lucia Highlands, pulling up greater nuance, complexity, and balance. The wines changed because the vineyards themselves had changed.
But the vineyards weren’t the only thing that evolved. My palate evolved as well.
When I was younger, I gravitated toward Pinot Noirs that were immediate, lush, and easy to drink upon release. Today, I find myself far more drawn to wines with structure, tension, and a sense of food-worthiness — wines that ask for patience and reward it. Friends of mine joke that I somehow managed to do things backward: when I was young, I made wines to drink young; now that I’m older, I make wines that require aging.
And while that is the path that I have chosen for my Clarice Pinot Noirs, I frequently have people who kindly share with me an older Siduri Pinot Noir from their cellar that I made in my youth. Tasting those bottles today has been both humbling and gratifying. They remind me that there was real beauty in those richer, more generous styles of Pinot Noir.
Working with different clients over the years has kept me connected to those styles and provided the inspiration for the 2025 Esselen Pinot Noir. With Esselen, I was able to select lots that capture some of the richness, openness, and immediacy that characterized many of my earlier wines, while blending them with lots that carry the structure, energy, and depth that define the wines I make today at Clarice.
I wasn’t able to make much of this wine. Production was limited both by nature and by the tiny size of the individual lots themselves. But what I was able to create feels deeply meaningful to me.
Stylistically, I think of Esselen as a bridge between the younger Adam the winemaker and the older Adam the winemaker. More personally, I think of it as a recognition that the wines I made earlier in my career mattered more than I perhaps once admitted — and that there is value in honoring both where I started and where I’ve arrived.
Why the name Esselen? The Esselen people were the original inhabitants of what we now know as the Santa Lucia Highlands. For more than 6,000 years, their homeland stretched from the Carmel area south through Big Sur and inland across the Santa Lucia Mountains into the Salinas Valley.
Our written understanding of the Esselen begins in 1769, with the arrival of the Spanish. Early accounts described them as a people marked by generosity, kindness, and compassion — “a readiness to give food to anyone, and sympathy for those in distress.”
Tragically, the Esselen were forcibly relocated into the mission system, and much of their culture and language was lost. Yet their connection to this land endures. Today, descendants of the Esselen people continue working to preserve and honor their heritage. In support of those efforts, a small portion of the proceeds from every case of Esselen Pinot Noir sold will be donated to the organization connected to the Esselen descendants and their cultural preservation.
The 2025 Esselen Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir was created as a tribute to the Esselen people and to their enduring relationship with this remarkable landscape — a place that today produces some of the world’s greatest Pinot Noir vineyards.
May this wine be shared generously, enjoyed thoughtfully, and opened in the same spirit of hospitality for which the Esselen were once known.
FUTURES TO BE SHIPPING WHEN WEATHER PERMITS IN THE FALL OF 2026