13 scores of 90 or better in the last year!

Our style of elegant, finesse-driven Pinot Noir is not one to usually wow the critics and get the big scores. We are honored to be receiving consistently strong scores across the board from all of the major critics.

We’ve always stuck to our guns and never tried to please anyone but ourselves. Perhaps balance and grace will triumph after all!

2006 Audrey     92 – Wine Advocate

                                         92 – Wine Enthusiast

                                         91 – Burghound

                                         91 – Steve Tanzer/IWC

2006 La Paulée       91 – Wine Advocate

                                                91 – Wine Enthusiast

                                                90+ - Steve Tanzer/IWC

                                                90 – Wine Spectator

2005 Audrey       92 – Wine Enthusiast

                                             91 – Burghound

                                             90 – Steve Tanzer/IWC

2005 La Paulée     91 – Wine Enthusiast

                                             90 – Burghound

Wow. Wow again! Three nice new scores and write-ups in the new issue of Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate today,  and a nod as top Pinot of the year in Northwest Palate (see below) - we are having a jubilant end to crush around here, to say the least!

Kudos to winemaker Kelley Fox for her incredible dedication, commitment to quality, and painstaking attention to detail. Kelley rocks!

First off - huge thanks to everyone who came to our winemaker dinner in Sisters on Wednesday night with Cork Cellars and Jen’s Garden - it was a really special night, and a good time was had by all!  I’d love to make it an annual event…

We are all so excited for our 3rd annual La Paulée de Carlton celebration tomorrow. We’re having an Open House in the tasting room from 11-4, with a bunch of the newly arrived ‘06 Burgs open for tasting, and the unveiling of our 2007 Audrey Pinot Noir - which can be purchased as futures in the month of November, while they last. Every release of Audrey has been one of the top-rated wines of the vintage, and we’re way happy with the 2007 - it is a beautiful example of everything we hope to achieve with our wines - elegance and beauty, grace and finesse, and natural balance. So please join us tomorrow for your first chance to get a taste.

Normally, we’re finished with crush and everything is resting quietly in barrel by the time the first Saturday in November rolls around - but due to the late harvest this year we’re still in the middle of it all. I don’t know how they’ve done it, but Kelley Fox and her crew have managed to get the winery magically transformed and ready for our La Paulée dinner tomorrow night. Fortunately the weather has turned pretty chilly, so we can safely move some of the remaining fermenters outside onto the covered crushpad for the evening. If you’re joining us for dinner tomorrow night - you will find yourself in the middle of what is truly a “working winery”!

I so look forward to our “La Paulée” dinner every year - with a lot of our neighboring vintners and friends and customers joining us to celebrate the harvest, and everybody bringing some treasured bottles from their cellars to share with the group. It’s a great tradition, and I truly love the spirit of it. (The event is sold-out for tomorrow night - but mark your calendars for next year - Saturday November 7th). I can hardly believe that a week from Tuesday I’ll be off to Burgundy for their Paulée, as well as the Hospices de Beaune auction and an intense 10 days of tasting in all of our producers cellars.

Here are a few shots from this year’s crush - we’ve been blessed not only with a fantastic vintage, but an amazing team in the cellar as well!

Winemaker Kelley Fox with journalist Condé Cox

Sean on punch-down duty

Harvest at Ribbon Ridge

Wow! Holy Sh*t! I just opened up the new (November/December issue) Northwest Palate magazine that arrived in the mail today, to find that we were named the “Best Pinot Noir of the Year”! Publishers Cameron Nagel and Cole Danehower singled out our 2006 Audrey as the best they’d tasted this year - all I can say is we are truly honored and deeply appreciative. We start selling futures of the 2007 Audrey this weekend at our La Paulée festivities at the winery - so the timing is quite nice indeed! Click here for the Northwest Palate website…

Maresh fruit in the oak tank

 

 

 

In my last post I was threatening to do some human punch-downs - so here I am, almost up to my elbows in it!

When you mention winemaking these days, it seems that the first image that comes to mind with most folks is the scene from “I Love Lucy”, and everybody wants to know if they can come out and help us “stomp on the grapes”.  Generally, grapes are not crushed by foot anymore (except in Portugal, where the tradition continues.) What does still happen, though, is what we call a “human pigeage”. Pigeage is the French term for “punch-down” - the act of pushing the floating skins and solids down into the fermenting juice. Nowadays most of this is done by hand with a long wooden or stainless-steel staff with a metal or plastic disc at the bottom. However, many estates in Burgundy, and even some of us here in Oregon, have been known to hop into the tanks feet-first.

There’s an advantage to this - by being physically in the tank you can tell if there are any cool or warm spots, you can more evenly distribute any whole-clusters in the tank, more gently extract the flavors and color form the skins, and you can just get a better feel for the fermentation. I will be taking the plunge tonight, getting warm and sticky in a few tanks of our Momtazi fruit that is mid-fermentation right now. (Yes, it’s sanitary - we wash thoroughly and sanitize our feet and legs prior to getting in, and between the tanks as well…) The only downside is that it can be colder than hell when you get out!

We are blessed with an abundance of natural beauty here in Oregon throughout the year (yes, even in the rainy winter we get a lot of sun-breaks, and everyting is really, really green) - but perhaps right now - the heart of fall right after the harvest - is the most stunning of all. Nature puts on quite show, and the vineyards are at their most splendid just before they give up the ghost for the year.

Here’s a great shot taken out of my old office window at Domaine Drouhin - it doesn’t get much better than this -

Another day removed from harvest gives me a few minutes to dig into the nuts and bolts of our grapes for the year.

The end result is that we averaged 1.46 tons per acre over all of our vineyards - with only Ribbon Ridge coming in at our target of 2 tons (actually Ribbon Ridge was a little over, at about 2.2 tons per acre.) Several blocks of Momtazi were right at 1 tpa. In the blocks we farm biodynamically at Maresh, we had 1.82 tpa in the upper block and 1.32 tpa down below. Again, the quality was so nice everywhere - I just really wish we had more of it!

These are the lowest yields we’ve seen since 2004 & 2005, when we averaged just over 1 tpa across all sites in both of those years. Time will tell as to the ultimate character and quality of the resulting wines, but the vibe around the valley right now is that we all wish we had more…

Speaking of wishing for more, here’s a shout-out to Christophe & Sandrine Thibert at our stellar producer Thibert Père & Fils in the Mâconnais - they lost about 75% of their crop in Pouilly-Fuissé this year due to a 10-minute hailstorm that blew through in August. That simply sucks beyond words. We are so fortunate to not have the threat of summer hailstorms here in Oregon - and it makes me realize I absolutely can’t complain about a vintage with great quality and 1.46 tpa - we are truly blessed, in fact.

Here’s a shot of some vines in Pouilly-Fuissé this summer, before the hail took its toll…

With all the fruit now in the winery, and the first fermentations moving along nicely, it’s time to reflect for a moment on the flurry of activity over the last 11 days. We started picking on October 9th with a couple of tons at Coats & Whitney vineyard, finished on the 16th with some beautiful fruit from our blocks of Momtazi, and I’m very happy to say that we are indeed thrilled with all of our fruit this year.

It was a fairly compressed harvest, with all of the fruit coming in in the space of one week (often it can be 10 days to two weeks+ from beginning to end.) Everything truly ripened at about the same time, and generally at the same levels of ripeness. It’s a vintage that should really favor our style - natural alcohol levels will be in the low 13s, and I haven’t seen such nice acid/pH balance in the fruit in our ten years of winemaking. I have very high hopes for these 2008s. Pinot of course takes a lot of left-turns and sees a lot of peaks and valleys over the course of élévage, but I’m betting at the end of the day we’ll have some pretty, delicious, and well-balanced wines to bottle one year from now. The one downside is that we will be about 1,000 cases short of what we would normally have produced this year - yields were a miserly 1 ton to the acre in a number of our blocks. The clusters and berries were small - with excellent skin-to-juice ratios, but they just never sized-up as we expected them to over the course of the season. We just won’t have enough wine to sell when these are released in the spring of 2010. This has hit us before, both in 2004 and 2005. Welcome to the wonderful world of winemaking!

Being able to say we’ve had a top-quality year was not a given just a few months ago - we had a late, wet, and cool spring, resulting in the vineyards being at least two weeks behind all throughout the growing season. A quirky, cooler summer didn’t bode well, and it wasn’t until September that the warmth and sunshine we needed finally arrived. When it finally came, it stayed, and though we didn’t make up any time, we ended up with beautifully ripe grapes in the end. 2008 will go down as one of the latest harvests in Willamette Valley Pinot history - and it looks like we’ve got the potential for a great one.

Please plan to join us to celebrate the harvest - our 3rd annual La Paulée de Carlton tasting happens all day on Saturday November 1st - and it’s your first chance to order futures of the lovely 2007 Audrey Pinot. Then, it’s our La Paulée Dinner in the cellars that night - a few seats still remain for this bacchanalian evening, and we’d love you to be part of it. Book your seats with Kelly Karr at 503 319 5827 or kellykarr@scottpaul.com

Only 10% of all wine produced in Burgundy is classified at the lofty Premier Cru level – only vineyards that have proven to be distinctively excellent over the centuries make the cut. This weekend we’ll be featuring four exciting 1er Crus from across Burgundy, as well as two of our own Scott Paul Pinots.

You’ll taste the 2006 Chablis Fourchaume from Frédéric Gueguen, René Leclerc’s 2006 Gevrey-Chambertin Les Champeaux, the 2006 Gevrey-Chambertin Bel-Air from Taupenot-Merme, and Violot-Guillemard’s rockin’ 2006 Beaune Clos des Mouches. On the Scott Paul side we’ll be showing the brand new 2007 Cuvée Martha Pirrie and the 2006 La Paulée Pinots. Tasting fee for this special flight is $10, refundable with purchase.  20% discount on Featured Burgundies throughout weekend. 11-4 p.m. both days.

There is nothing like the scent of newly-started fermentations in the winery. It’s a unique mix of CO2, yeast, berry aromas, and what I can only describe as “strawberry mousse”. Sort of a subtly sweet smell of fresh wild strawberries and  perfumed whipped cream - it doesnt’happen all the time, but when it does it is quite magical.

There’s a great example going on right now in with our Maresh Vineyard Block 12 fruit in our open-top Taransaud oak 3-ton fermenter. And it looks like this -

The activity of the native yeasts devouring the sugars in the grape juice produces alcohol and CO2, and sometimes the gas pushes up this beautiful pink foam - the “Strawberry Mousse”.  I love it when this happens - I just think it’s a good omen. All of our lots are behaving nicely so far, and the flavors and aromas continue to make us happy!

Please plan to stop by our tasting room this weekend if you can - we’re doing a special flight of 1er Cru Burgundies along with our 07 Cuvée Martha Pirrie and 06 La Paulée Pinots - 6 wines all together, and a great opportunity to taste a nice selection of Burgs we don’t normally open. It’s from 11-4 Saturday & Sunday - hope to see you then!

Everything’s in the barn - that’s the winemaking expression that means “all our fruit has been picked for this year, and everything is in tank in the winery”. Whew! It’s a great feeling to have it done, and it’s a daunting feeling to look at all those tanks that need attention for the next few weeks!

I’m really happy with the quality throughout - it should be an excellent year for us. The flavors are bright and red-fruit focused, with excellent balance all around. It reminds me a bit of 2005, but we’ll see how they develop over time. I am not happy with the quantity, however. Of course I’m a huge proponent of low yields, but 1 ton per acre is a bit too low - again the quality will be lovely, but there just won’t be enough wine to sell in 2010 when these babies are ready for release. Oh well - it’s just another reminder that this is indeed an agricultural business, and mother nature always has the last word…

Boeuf D’Oregon

Serves 8-10

This is our family’s twist on a classic French dish, Boeuf Bourguignon.  Since we make Oregon Pinot Noir, and also import wines from 15 small producers in Burgundy, this dish represents the sum of our passion for pinot, on both sides of the pond!  The preparation could not be simpler, and the results are instant comfort for a hungry crew.

4 pounds boneless beef chuck roast, trimmed and cut into 1 ½-inch cubes

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

¼ cup olive oil

3 large yellow onions, sliced ¼-inch thick

1 pound white mushrooms, sliced

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

¼ cup tomato paste

1 cup Pinot Noir (or more)

2 cups baby carrots

Season meat generously with salt and pepper.  Heat the olive oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat.  Brown the meat on all sides, in batches, remove meat and set meat aside.  Add the onions to the pot and sauté, stirring frequently until they soften, about 10 minutes.  Add the mushrooms, cover the pot, and cook until softened, about 5 minutes.  Return meat to pot, scooping sautéed mushrooms and onions on top of meat.  Add the Worcestershire sauce and ½ cup wine.  Cover pot and simmer over low heat for 1 hour.  Add the tomato paste, ½ cup of wine and carrots, and continue to cook, covered, for another 30 minutes or until fork-tender, checking occasionally to see if more liquid is required.  Serve over rice or polenta.