Vintage review coming soon.
A warm spell in early spring assured an average bud break in mid-April. Following this, things slowed as the weather turned cool and wet. Even early summer remained wet and humid. These early-season conditions led to Rastafarian vine growth by mid-season. Big, bushy vines require more work in the vineyard to keep them hedged and properly positioned. The trade-off comes in the horsepower of such vigorous vines. With all those leaves ready to turn sunlight into sugar, when the heat and sun did arrive in July, fruit began to develop rapidly. Despite all the early-season set-backs, by early August the color change of veraison was upon us, and we faced another year of prospective record-setting heat accumulation.
As in 2004, late-season rain slowed fruit development, and our patience won us just enough hang-time. Picking decisions seem to play an ever larger role with each passing year, as we all do our best to balance earlier sugar accumulation with the quest for adequate flavor development. We began harvesting on September 25th—the first crop from Matt Saikonnen’s exciting new property in the Ribbon Ridge AVA, and completed harvest on October 21st with the McDuffee Syrah on November 5th.
The results from 2006 seem most reminiscent of 2003, complete with the robust alcohol. What distinguishes 2006, though, is greater refinement of tannins and far more fresh forward fruit. They will be big wines, but they will be easy wines as well.”
Finally a cooler year, but also some late rain that helped prolong the growing season. We achieved great hang-time in the vineyards. The final day of harvest, October 16th was hardly our latest, but having started early, the total growing season was among our longest yet.
The frequently heavy rains did put a lot of disease pressure on the vineyards. Our management team had done a great job of safeguarding against mildew and rot, but with ripe fruit and rain enough to damage the berries, we did see mold and Botrytis begin to develop late in the vineyard. Naturally, we dropped even more fruit. Between low, variable set, some necessary thinning to balance the vines and now the weather, we were left with crop-loads between 0.75 and 1.7 tons per acre.
The 2004 vintage had all the over-heated hallmarks of the preceding vintages, but it saw welcome rain arrive around harvest. Like everyone else, I managed all my picking decisions around these rain events. We waited until the fruit tasted ripe. Then we waited for the rain. We waited a few more days for the vines to take-up all this rain and regain their balance; then we picked. Our patience was rewarded with fresh, vibrant fruit, fine acid and tannin, and much lower alcohol than we otherwise faced. I love the wines for all these attributes, as well as the earth and spice achieved in the cellar with plenty of whole-cluster in the fermentor and adequate time to evolve in the barrel and bottle.
Waiting for the other shoe to drop—and still waiting. Given a classic misunderstanding of the Law of Averages, one had to assume that after five superlative vintages, the other shoe was going to drop on the Willamette Valley. What we've ended up with is a winemaker's half-dozen great vintages, a season eerily similar to last year's, and a heightened sense of dread as we search the skies for that other shoe.
Hard as it seems to believe, 2003's fruit was even riper than 2002's. And though the results share many similarities, this year's ride was bouncier and the finale much less certain. Bud break was even earlier this year, beginning during the first week of April. As usual the early spring was cool and wet, but the warming, drying trend began earlier. By flowering, individual vineyards were anywhere from 3 days to 10 days ahead of last year. Ripening progressed so rapidly that by the time we completed crop estimates on August 14th, some vineyards had completed more than 50% veraison, or color change. Under such ideal conditions, most vines had little difficulty setting a large crop again this year-up to 10-tons-per-acre in some sites; however, where abundance was the norm last year, this year's crop size varied widely. In the Maresh Vineyard, for example, of the 14 blocks, only 6 set over 2 tons-per-acre, and those just barely; of course, none of those were ours.
To reach our target crop size in more bounteous blocks, we implemented an increasingly refined series of crop reductions. We first removed excess young, tender shoots to retain a distribution among the remaining shoots that maximized sun exposure. Next, based on highly sophisticated and wildly unreliable sampling techniques, we estimated the remaining crop size, and the vineyard crew removed fruit one or more times until we reached our target crop size. Finally, the crew made an additional pass late in the season to remove any lagging or undesirable clusters. Because of the warm, windy, and dry conditions, the final yield was much smaller than predicted, and the season's considerable energy focused on a crop averaging just 1.46 tons-per-acre overall.
As we approached harvest, 2003 began distinguishing itself. First, owing to the consistently warm, exceptionally dry conditions, all vineyards converged, appearing as though they would all be ready to harvest at the same time, just like last year. Second, the weather models predicted that on or about October 4th it would begin raining with little respite, just like last year. Unfortunately, unlike last year, it did begin raining as predicted. While the fruit had a lot of sugar by then, only the younger vines showed much flavor development; the rest tasted sweet and green, like under-ripe raisins. So we waited until the last second before the rain and picked all the young fruit on September 27th. We worked 24 hours straight to process the fruit, and then waited and watched. The weather models were disarmingly accurate this year, but still just wrong enough to suit our needs. We had two more windows: one closing on October 5th, the other on October 15th. Each time we waited to pick until the day before the rain, then processed over the next 30 or more hours. The intervening periods of rain greatly revitalized the vineyards and their dehydrating fruit. Even in their youth, the resulting wines show precise, focused, and varietally correct flavors, surprisingly balanced, ripe tannins and great length. Though not necessarily better, they show greater refinement than any vintage in my memory. These wines prove, we think, that it's not always better to be among the throng that "picked before the rains."
What a year, again. The growing season started early, with bud break on April 9th, almost a week ahead of the historic average. We lost some of that early advantage as the Spring was cool, with sporadic frost; nonetheless, flowering occurred “on-time” in mid-June. Mostly ideal conditions during and after flowering yielded a huge crop of large clusters, over 10-tons-per-acre in some sites.
To mitigate the effects of such superabundance, we aggressively reduced the crop as soon as we could accurately predict yield. Using a refined method for sampling vines, we developed a crop-thinning regime that retained the smallest, most uniformly ripe clusters to attain tonnage targets. In some vineyard blocks, we accomplished this before August, providing an enormous head start for the remaining clusters. Meanwhile, an unusually warm, dry July and August advanced ripening, and color change, or veraison, began around August 10th, suggesting we had moved ahead of our idealized schedule.
The fifth consecutive, abnormally warm, dry Fall matured the fruit beautifully down the homestretch. This ideal weather allowed us to predicate our picking decisions on flavor alone. While there was an ominous threat of almost uninterrupted rain beginning the second week of October, we played a hunch and did nothing. Fortunately, little precipitation actually materialized and we welcomed the minimal rain that did fall. This well-timed rain merely brought sugars in line with physiological ripeness, as warm days and cool nights advanced fruit maturity to historic highs while maintaining acidity. We harvested everything between October 14th and 18th. The fruit consistently was clean, beautifully colored and intensely aromatic.
The growing season of 2001 started “normally.” The bud break and bloom were neither early nor very late. It seems over the years we see bud break occur around that wonderfully American day April 15th. This year our bud break started slowly and was in full swing by the 19th of April. The months of April, May and June offered us a typical spring in Oregon, at one moment cold, wet and gray and the next minute we were blessed with clear crisp blue skies.
Once set was completed we headed out to the vineyards to see how much fruit was on the vines. The 2001 crop year started out strong and we discovered all of our vines had a very successful set, translating into potentially larger than experienced clusters. After diligently sampling 10 to 20 vines per acre, counting the clusters and weighing the fruit, we estimated we had far too much crop on the vines to give us the intense quality we look for. So, our vineyard crews were sent out immediately to drop the number of clusters at most sites down to one cluster per shoot. After thinning our acreage down to where we wanted them, we experienced an abnormal weather streak in Oregon—a spike of extremely hot temperatures; some sites hit well over 100 degrees. These uncanny highs are very hard on vines when they have been experiencing temperatures only in the mid 70s. Physiologically, the vines weren't prepared for such intense heat. What followed is now called the green-berry phenomenon. Clusters that were damaged by the high heat reacted by never maturing past the point they were when the heat impacted them, leaving green berries on one side of an otherwise beautifully mature cluster. We simply removed those clusters, and ended up with even less fruit.
2000 Oregon Pinot Noir
Our first crush. We produced 97 cases of Pinot Noir from 4 barrels of wine. All the fruit came from one acre of Pommard clone grapes in Phelps Creek Vineyard outside of Hood River. It was a very warm year, and the higher elevation of Phelps Creek helped retain great acidity.
