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This wine has a brooding subtlety and great concentration, best savored with a ripe Brie and slices of apple and pear, or meditated over on its own. As with most of our Haynes bottlings, we find it pairs well with duck, sausages, lentils, or grilled lamb.

A concentrated vintage is exactly what we realized in the 1999 Westwood Haynes Vineyard Pinot Noir – a power, depth and complexity in the finished wine that has no comparison among our other vintages. Where the short crop and mild weather in 1998 combined to give us a concentrated, generous and open Haynes Pinot – one of our finest ever – these factors combined in 1999 to give us a brooding, monolithic, and intensely closed-in wine. Our winemaker compares the 1999 Haynes Pinot to the blockbuster 1992, which did not even start to evolve in the bottle until 2001. Great vintages should be rare – at Westwood we have ranked just three vintages of Haynes Pinot Noir at the very top of our list: the 1986, the 1992 and the 1998. We are pleasantly stunned that the 1999 Haynes Pinot Noir may have given us two top vintages in a row.

Anticipating Westwood’s eventual move from the Sierra Foothills to Sonoma, in 2000 we determined to start producing wines from the Sonoma Valley appellation. Since 1996 we had followed the development of a new Syrah and Pinot Noir vineyard at the alluvial foot of the hills west of the town of Sonoma. The vineyard’s owners had spared no expense in its preparation, development and farming – a perfect fit with the Westwood philosophy. A deal was struck.

We very much like the style we achieved with this wine. The 1998 Sunny Oak Syrah is a bit deceptive – showing more floral and racy aromas than the 1997, but with an even softer mouthfeel and less perception of alcohol. Our 1998 Syrah shows much finesse, and beautifully demonstrates the perfumed terroir of this site.