If we were looking for the tasting to confirm a predominant style for Anderson Valley pinot noir, we didn’t find one. As has been my experience, the wines were all over the map, some vibrant and fine, and others sweet and powerfully fruity; some harmonious, others disjointed. All of us found a wide gap between the wines we liked and those we did not.

I should point out that many top Mendocino pinot noirs were not in our tasting. We buy all our wines retail, and single-vineyard wines from producers like Anthill Farms, Littorai, Kutch and Copain are expensive and very hard to find. Rhys, whose pinot noirs from the Santa Cruz Mountains are among America’s best, ventured out a few years ago to plant a vineyard in the Anderson Valley. Its Bearwallow Vineyard pinot noir is superb, but its retail price, at least in New York, was beyond the wine panel’s $100-a-bottle limit.

Nonetheless, we included regional wines from Anthill and Copain in our tasting, and both did well. In fact, the 2009 Anthill Farms was our No. 1 bottle, balanced and vivacious, but perhaps without the complexity of the producer’s single-vineyard wines. It was also our best value at $37. Similarly, the 2009 Les Voisins from Copain, our No. 4 wine, was lively, bright and harmonious, yet not as intense and nuanced as, say, its wines from the Kiser Vineyard.

Twomey, owned by Silver Oak Wine Cellars, the well-known cabernet producer, doesn’t fit the Copain and Anthill model of the small boutique winemaker. Yet its 2009 Anderson Valley pinot noir was one of our favorites, bigger and softer but with both finesse and intensity. Our No. 3 bottle was the 2009 Nash Mill Vineyards from Husch, an old-line Mendocino producer that was founded more than 40 years ago. Unlike the newer, more focused producers, Husch makes 22 different wines, a reason, perhaps, that I’ve generally found its wines inconsistent. But the ’09 Nash Mills was pretty, spicy and floral.

You can see the two sides of Mendocino in our next two bottles, both of which were made with grapes from the Savoy Vineyard. The No. 5 Benovia Savoy Vineyard was in the big, modern style, with plenty of oak and sweet fruit flavors, but balanced and integrated. The No. 6 Radio-Coteau also had sweet flavors of dark fruit, but the wine was fresher, livelier and more compact. Same site, more or less, but different philosophies. The panel in general liked the Benovia better, but the Radio-Coteau is more my style.

I mentioned that almost all the pinot noirs were from Anderson Valley, but one, the plummy, intense 2009 Drew, was from Valenti Vineyard in Mendocino Ridge, an area just west of Anderson Valley on several noncontiguous ridges at least 1,200 feet high, above the fog line. It’s an area better known for zinfandel, but several producers like Drew have recently put in vineyards. It’s another sign of the compulsion to seek out new California sites to grow pinot noir.