This month, we travel to the Anderson Valley, to try a wine from one of my favorite wine makers - Milla Handley of Handley Cellars.  Milla has been crafting wines under the Handley Cellars label in the Anderson Valley since 1982.  Since that time, she has garnered a national reputation for balanced, well-made, and well priced wines that reflect the terroir of the Anderson Valley. 

Her top Pinot Noir - Handley Cellars Holmes Ranch Pinot Noir comes from grapes farmed on the Handley Estate and contiguous, neighboring vineyards. Originally, Holmes Ranch was a homestead inhabited in the early 1900’s by the Guntly family. It is the current location of Handley Cellars. Locals call this area, closest to the coast, the “Deep End”. Its cold spring mornings and cool coastal summer breezes encourage slow ripening and create intense Pinot Noirs with bright flavors, complexity, and depth. The mix of vineyards and clones give this wine focus and complexity. It is a blend of Romani Vineyard located just behind Handley Cellars, RSM - a hillside vineyard, and the Estate Vineyard.

Late spring rains created an abundant vintage. Warm summer weather, combined with careful crop and canopy management, allowed Milla  to harvest ripe, flavorful fruit. The fruit for this blend was carefully hand-harvested before being de-stemmed and crushed, leaving about 40% whole berries in the fermenter. After crushing, the fruit cold-soaked for three days prior to fermentation.

The Holmes Ranch Pinot Noir is a bright wine from start to finish.  Bing cherry, red plum, and rose petal aromas lead into dried cherry, tea leaf, and a hint of dark chocolate. The texture is both silky smooth and substantial with a graceful and lingering finish.

This wine has an affinity for smoky and grilled dishes. Slow cooked pork tinga (mild Mexican version), rib eye steaks, simple grilled salmon, roast quail with cherry glaze, and tomato-based pasta dishes would all make excellent pairings.

92 Points - Wine & Spirits Magazine:  This pinot hits the fragrant Anderson Valley notes of rose and black tea, its refreshing dark cherry flavors saturating the wine without any excess weight. The warm spice of the tannin firms up the finish, with the juicy savor to match tea-smoked duck.

Milla Handley is one of the few women in wine who is both the proprietor and winemaker at her own winery. Milla is the great-granddaughter of the owner of the Blitz-Weinhard Brewery in Portland, Oregon, but she realized early on that winemaking was more her suit than large-scale beer production. Raised in the San Francisco Bay area, she graduated from UC Davis with a degree in fermentation science, and studied under Richard Arrowood at Chateau St. Jean. In 1978, she moved to Anderson Valley with her husband, Rex S. McClellan, who went to work at Navarro. Meanwhile, Milla mentored under Jed Steele at Edmeades and made her first 250 cases of Chardonnay in her home basement in 1982. She welcomed the rural lifestyle of the Anderson Valley. Luckily, she was mechanically inclined, because when farm or winemaking equipment broke, there were few people to call on to fix it. Milla acquired a 59-acre estate on Highway 128 in Philo, part of the historic Holmes Ranch and built Handley Cellars into a renowned winery producing 18,000 cases of several varieties annually. Planting of the estate vineyard began in 1986 and continued until 1999, now encompassing 30 acres of Pinot Noir (12.5 acres), Chardonnay and Gewürztraminer. The Handley Cellars Estate Vineyard was organically certified in 2005 by the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) which is accredited by the USDA.

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