Pinot Noir reacts to a long cold growing season by becoming darker and more intense. Cool Oregon vintages – such as 1999 and 2008 – reward the uncertainty involved in their production with strikingly expressive wines. This is exactly what happened in 2010. As in 2008 the yields were very low. Poor fruit set, combined with draconian thinning and the tariff of the birds left us with less than half the wine to offer compared with previous years. But the wine that we have is exquisite. The 2010 wines share the concentration of 2008, but the expression is slightly less tannic and about a half-degree lower in alcohol (13% as compared to 13.5%). This slight dip in alcohol translates into wines of perfect pitch; they resonate with greater fidelity than anything we have produced before.

Antica Terra is a blend of Pinot Noir that reflects everything we do during the course of the vintage. It carries the mark of each step and every decision. The blend is based around fruit from our 11-acre vineyard in Amity and exhibits a delicate inclination toward rock, forest floor and flowers.

Botanica’s identity is completely different. It is built around fruit from Shea Vineyards in Yamhill, where we work with 8 acres of Pinot Noir split between the East and West hill. Our aim with this wine is to allude to the opulent possibilities of the varietal, while retaining it’s essentially graceful nature.

 

Erratica is named for the giant rocks that are carried on the backs of glaciers and left to rest, alone and isolated, hundreds of miles from their true home. The name refers to the fact that they are of a completely different nature than everything else that lies in the field. Erratica is our most unconventional and experimental wine. Like the solitary rocks it is named after, it is completely unlike anything else. Typically rosé is made in one of two ways. Either it is pressed directly like a white wine, or bled from a fermenter destined for red wine during the first 24 hours. In this conventional sense, this is not rosé; but neither is it red or white. The liquid is macerated on the skins for a little over a week. Somewhere between the 6th and 8th day, the aromatics of the fermentation reach a peak of expression and fill the room with astonishing perfume. At this point, just before it becomes red wine, we siphon the juice from the fermenters and fill the barrels, where the juice finishes its fermentation and ages on the lees for a year before bottling.

 

Antikythera
To be released November 1st 2012