’09s in the bottle, ‘10 on the vine…
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010Final prep is done for the bottling of the lush and succulent 2009s. Kelley will hand bottle the Magnums today, and then we’ll run all the 750s on the line tomorrow. Bottling will only be a one day affair this year, as we sadly have very little of these gorgeous 2009s to bottle. We lost all of our Ribbon Ridge fruit to a freak spring frost last year, and that was to have been about half of our production. Fortunately, what little we do have is excellent. The fruit is round and rich and velvety and forward, though better balanced than the 2006s, for example. The 09s will probably garner a lot of good press and be very much a “crowd-pleaser” of a vintage.
As for our different cuvées in 2009, there will be three. La Paulée, of course, a scant 150 cases of Audrey, and a tiny 100 case bottling we’re calling “Dix” - French for “the Tenth” - as in our 10th anniversary (our first vintage was 1999.) So, watch for these babies in late 2011 and early 2012 - but watch quickly, they won’t be around for long…
Our bizarre summer weather continues here in the Willamette Valley with a lot of yin-yang. Hot then cool, hot then cool. We remain about 3+ weeks behind, and are still in dire need of lots of sunshine and warmth throughout September and most of October to make it work. It happened in 2008, so why not again?
I draw your attention now to an article by Dana Tims in the Oregonian a couple of days ago, in which a few investers and farmers are touting mechanical harvesting and mechanized farming as the path to success for Pinot Noir in the eastern Willamette Valley. I wish them luck, and sincerely wish everyone in this business success, but there are some serious problems with that approach. Nowhere in the world is Pinot Noir mechanically harvested on a regular basis and then made into a quality wine. You just can’t do it with Pinot - it needs too much loving care and attention, and every corner you cut in the production process dramatically lowers the quality of the wine. Yes, mechanical harvesting is in regular use in Burgundy - in CHABLIS, where they grow only Chardonnay. And even there, the top quality producers take the time and care and extra expense to harvest by hand. There simply are no shortcuts to good Pinot Noir.
If the goal is to produce decent $15-$20 wines, California is already doing that to the tune of tens of millions of cases a year. Why compete with that - when even the low-priced Californians are having trouble selling their wines these days? What the Willamette Valley can do, perhaps better than any region in the world, is produce top quality Pinot Noir that can compete with the best, and generally deliver better bang for the buck than most world-class wine regions. What will continue to build Oregon’s hard-earned reputation for quality will be exactly that - quality. David Lett, David Adelsheim & Dick Ponzi did not come here to make mass-market grape juice - they could have stayed in California for that…























