2022 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir Russian River Valley 750 ml

In 1979, Burt Williams and Ed Selyem alchemized a few tons of grapes they had gotten for free into their first wine. Their first vintage under the Williams Selyem name came in 1984, and a year later they introduced the world to their very first single-vineyard Pinot, from the Rochioli Vineyard in Russian River Valley. That bottle bested more than 2,000 others to win top red wine at the 1987 California State Fair.

That same year, demand for Williams Selyem exceeded supply, a milestone that brought them permanently into the world of “cult” wine—long before that term had even been used to describe the class of high-quality, never-enough-to-go-around wines that thousands of devoted fans anticipate every season. 1987 also marked the debut of the Williams Selyem waitlist, which gave Pinot lovers a reliable—but unbearably slow—way to score wines from Williams Selyem. A wait of two or three years is now customary. 

There’s no question that these wines are built for the cellar. One of our old-time collector friends has a knack for getting in on the ground floor of some of California’s top wineries, and he’s poured us early vintages of Arietta, Kosta Browne, even Diamond Creek. But one of the greatest dinners of our lives came the night he tapped into his Williams Selyem collection.   

That night, we tasted a dozen Williams Selyem Pinots dating from 2005 back to 1989, when the winery was a relative upstart. Every single wine was awash in gorgeous California red-berry fruit, and each one on our journey back through the years revealed a little more fruit complexity—and a little more disbelief that what was in our glasses wasn’t a perfectly cellared Burgundy.