Dustin Valette could have put his name on a bottle and called it a day. Instead, the Healdsburg chef built Valette Wines around collaborators, pairing each wine with the right winemaker. Bob Cabral makes his Pinot Noir. Jesse Katz makes his Cabernet Sauvignon. Erica Stancliff makes this Rosé of Pinot Noir. It’s a chef’s way of thinking: start with good fruit, put it in capable hands, then obsess over the details. At $29.99, we were immediately interested. Valette calls 2025 an exceptional vintage in the Russian River Valley, with a cooler summer that extended the growing season and preserved acidity. Stancliff sourced the Pinot Noir from small family-owned vineyards around Forestville, Sebastopol, and Graton, including Zaharoff and Trombetta. These are cool pockets of the appellation, shaped by fog and maritime air moving through the Petaluma wind gap, where Pinot ripens slowly. Stancliff treats the cellar more like a kitchen than a production line. A quarter of the wine is whole-cluster direct pressed into neutral French oak, another quarter comes from saignée and also sees neutral oak, while the remaining half stays in stainless steel. Partial malolactic fermentation and five months on the lees build texture around the freshness. Fruit, acidity, and texture each have their place. This is rosé made not simply for the patio, but for the table.