JUNE PREMIUM CLUB WINES
2006 Montinore Pinot Noir Estate
Price: $18
Drinkability: Good now
Availability: Plenty
This is the story of an old-line winery that has been rehabbed, and now produces a pinot that is the finest value I've had in a year or more.
Man, I love it when this kind of thing happens. Montinore has literally been the object of scorn among wine aficionados in Oregon for years. Part of the Old Guard, Montinore has been around forever, but their viticulture and winemaking never kept up with the times. So, their products lost ground to the competition. The wines in recent memory have ranged from barely acceptable to downright nasty. Note that these comments are despite a series of WS ratings in the mid-80s for some of their "reserve" level wines. But . . .
A couple of years ago, longtime employee Rudi Marchesi bought out the original owners, and began running the joint and making the wine himself. I first tasted Rudi's '05s, and they were very, very interesting - intense, bright red fruit with a strong wild cherry and pomegranate flavor, tinged with that blood / iodine thing we get from some Burgundy producers. We sold a few bottles of that stuff, but I had yet to determine whether it was a fluke, or a trend.
I recently tasted through the '06 pinot noirs from Montinore. I'm here to tell you that they are unique, intense, delicious, and utterly different from anything else in Oregon pinot noir these days. Marchesi has rescued one of the old-line Oregon names and brought it back to respectability. If future vintages mirror the last couple of years, this site could be deserving of real recognition.
The lineup consists of an inexpensive Estate pinot, a Reserve, and two block designated wines. They are all good, and share a clear terroir that mirrors what the property produced in '05: Intense fruit, bright acidity, great concentration, and a flavor profile of pie cherries, pomegranate and cranberry tinged with hints of blood, iodine and seabreeze (Santa Lucia Highlands pinot, anyone?). They are made from fully ripe grapes, but the site of the vineyard - at the extreme northwest of the Willamette Valley - is producing a flavor unlike anywhere else. While the block designated wines show more wood influence, and the Reserve is a bit more structured, our pick this month and the best of the bunch to my palate is the Estate bottling.
For a meager $18, this wine shows the kind of complexity, detail, balance and length that tends to fetch up to $40 and sometimes more in today's pinot noir market. It displays the character of the site with great precision and style, carried by a solid acidic backbone. It's a flavor profile nearly unique to Oregon pinot these days, which tends to ripe blackcherry and blackberry flavors. This wine is a remarkable deal considering all the thin, meager and modestly fruited wines available at a much higher price. This is the best value of the year, to my palate.
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Click here to buy the Montinore
2006 Seven of Hearts Pinot Noir
Price: $30
Production: 145 cases
Drinkability: Good, can age a bit
Availability: Good for now
Our New Indie Winery Pick!
Ah, the Indie Wine Festival. It's a nifty event in Portland that features some of Oregon's newest and smallest wineries competing to be part of a multi-day festival. The wineries must be very small, and self-distributed. Last season, I was one of a rather large group of judges, and we tried some great wines . . . and some crapola. That's to be expected. The good stuff was very good, however, and represents the cutting edge of Oregon wine producers.
(As an aside, the festival has really just one flaw, in my opinion. Too many judges from out of the area are asked to evaluate young, nearly raw wines. Unless you do that a lot, and then taste the same wines later to see how they develop, it's tough to really make an informed judgment. In fact, I judged last year with Alice Feiring, a New Yorker who has a wine blog (subsidiary note: a blog alone is NOT ENOUGH reason to call yourself a wine writer).
She simply had no idea what she was tasting, and made frequent comments that proved the point. I think she skewed the results in favor of weird, off-putting wines just to prove her point that unusual is sometimes better than simply good when it comes to wine. Alas, her taste in young pinot is simply undeveloped. In fact, locals with experience should judge the young wines, and THEN out-of-town judges -- preferably with more credentials than a wine blog -- can come in and choose the winners, and provide PR fodder. That's REALLY their primary job, right? But all of that is only a meaningless opinion, since the Portland Indie Wine Festival (trademark) is a private, for-profit event.)
This year, I cruised through the "trade" portion of the tasting, and had nearly all the wines. I generally disliked the '07 whites, I concluded. The fellow with the (very average) $32 pinot gris was dreaming, I concluded. Finally, I concluded that the Seven of Hearts Pinot Noir was the best pinot at the event that I had never heard of before. Good job judges!
Here's some background from the winery literature:
"Byron Dooley and his wife Dana toiled for years in the technology industry, working their way up the ladder in various Silicon Valley companies. But their passions lay elsewhere, and when the Internet bubble burst in 2000, they sold their house and moved to a 140-year-old, one bedroom cottage in Napa County's Howell Mountain appellation.
"While earning his viticulture and winemaking degree at Napa Valley College, Byron planted a vineyard on the property (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot), interned at respected Pinot noir producer Williams Selyem, and made his own Bordeaux-style wine from two successive vintages of Napa fruit. Meanwhile Dana launched a chocolates business based on recipes and techniques she'd developed over a 20-year period.
"As Byron's graduation approached, the Dooleys began to look for an area with the potential to make outstanding wines, but still cool enough most of the year that chocolate wouldn't melt. They were drawn to Oregon's Willamette Valley for its beauty, climate, and world-class Pinot noir. In spring 2004 they found a property in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA with favorable slope, orientation and soil composition.
Byron planned and developed the 12-acre vineyard to take full advantage of the features that make the site so attractive for Pinot noir, while enhancing the extraordinary natural beauty of the location. At the same time he contracted with select vineyards in nearby appellations with the goal of creating a portfolio of limited production very special wines reflecting the distinct characteristics of those appellations and vineyards.
"The Dooleys chose the name Seven of Hearts for this labor of love. The label on the bottle, which resembles a medieval-style playing card in the hearts suit, symbolizes Byron's passion for the traditional Burgundian style of Pinot noir. The label's center features a heraldic cat, representing Seven, the owners' cat."
Okay, back to the wine. It's got a nice hit of dark red fruit, plenty of stuffing through the middle, just a hint of tannin for complexity, and a nice long run-out on the end. There's real density, and the wine is complex. It is a very good freshman effort, and is also priced quite reasonably - other new producers should take note! While the wine is delicious now, it's also got enough stuffing for a few years in the cellar, if you desire.
>> Click here to buy the Seven of Hearts
2006 Dobbes Family Estates Pinot Noir "Meyer Vineyard" 