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~ Williams Selyem ~
Williams Selyem Winery began as a simple dream between two friends, Ed Selyem and Burt Williams, who pursued weekend winemaking as a hobby in 1979 in a garage in Forestville, California, and made their first commercial vintage in 1981. In less than two decades, Burt & Ed created a cult-status winery of international acclaim. Together they set a new standard for Pinot Noir winemaking in the United States, aligning Sonoma County's Russian River Valley in the firmament of the best winegrowing regions of the world.
Burt and Ed were neighbors in the Russian River Valley, living across the river from one another. They both held down full time jobs, but were restless to delve further into the object of their mutual passion—wine. Burt was a 26-year veteran pressman for the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, and Ed worked as the accountant and wine buyer at Speer's market in Forestville, in addition to making his own label called Hacienda del Rio. Burt had begun home winemaking on the weekends, and Ed had traveled the world without leaving Sonoma County by tasting and buying wines for the store.
As friends, they decided to make a go of winemaking together in a two-car garage on River Road. The concrete pad outside held the small dairy tanks that they used as fermenters. Through grower and winemaker Leno Martinelli, they sourced fruit for their first wines from the 84-year old Zinfandel vines of Jackass Hill, along with a small amount of Muscat grapes grown on the same property. Even though the winemaking equipment was very basic relative to some of the more modern wineries at the time, the combination of excellent fruit sourcing, hand harvesting in small forty-pound lug boxes, meticulous sorting at the winery and hand pressing of the grapes and skins proved to be a powerful formula in crafting intense wines of character and place.
The resulting single-vineyard designate Pinot Noir wines were truly distinctive in style and dramatic in their intensity. A small but growing cult following from a mailing list of friends of the winery bought everything they could make. They remained a well-kept secret until the 1987 California State Fair committee conferred upon the 1985 Rochioli Pinot Noir the title of sweepstakes winner and the winery won Winery of the Year concurrently. Williams Selyem was thus thrown into the national spotlight and officially launched into the arena of world-class wines.
Today, the winery still carefully executes the Williams Selyem philosophy of "respecting the juice." From fermentation to bottling, including the no pumping and filter-free methods, the winemakers use these processes to ensure that the quality of the wine is not compromised. Fortunately, they seem to have none of the typical pressures that many wineries do today and are therefore able to focus strictly on quality. This almost ceremonial approach to creating these wines can be tasted in every bottle.
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Pinot Noir
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| | 2005 Williams Selyem "Allen Vineyard" - Russian River Valley | 285
| | 2005 Williams Selyem "Bucher Vineyard" - Russian River Valley | 265
| | 2005 Williams Selyem "Flax Vineyard" - Russian River Valley | 265
| 2005 Williams Selyem "Rochioli Riverblock Vineyard - Russian River Valey
| 305
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| 2005 Williams Selyem "Precious Mountain Vineyard" - Sonoma Coast
| 320
| 2005 Williams Selyem "Vista Verde Vineyard" - San Benito County
| 265
| 2005 Williams Selyem "Weir Vineyard" - Yorkville Highlands
| 250
| 2005 Williams Selyem "Ferrington Vineyard - Anderson Valley
| 305
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| 2004 Williams Selyem - Russian River Valley
| 190
| 2005 Williams Selyem - Russian River Valley
| 180
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| 2005 Williams Selyem - Sonoma Coast
| 166
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| 2003 Williams Selyem - Central Coast
| 178
| 2004 Williams Selyem - Central Coast
| 169
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| Zinfandel
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| | 2005 Williams Seylem "Forcini Vineyard" - Russian River Valey | 229
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| *All Prices and Vintages are subject to change without notice due to Availabilty
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