Goodfellow Whistling Ridge Blanc de Blancs $50 offer price ($60 retail)
Whistling Ridge meets the Cote des Blancs…this vineyard is undoubtedly among the best situated sites for the possibilities of sparkling wines in the Willamette Valley. Ripening with low sugars, consistent exposure to breezes, shallow soils, and low vigor, it’s nearly ideal for sparkling wines. This first offering shows the terroir of the site: textural and weightlessly dense. Aromatics are flinty in nature, seawater, oyster shells, stone, and more oceanic qualities. In the mouth, more stones, kaffir lime curd, mandarin peel, steel, and star fruit. Compact but powerful, it will be wonderful to see how this evolves over the next few years, and also to see how the bottles slated to be in tirage for 3-5 years will evolve. Non-dosage and 120 cases produced.
Durant Vineyard Blanc de Blancs $50 offer price ($60 retail)
The Chardonnay at Durant grown at the foot of the hill has always provided us with extremely good raw materials for still Chardonnay in the Goodfellow style. It lends itself to tranquility and texture, the cooling flavors of the Dundee Hills and takes on lees inflection with grace. The sparkling wine is no different, showcasing pastry dough and grain notes, lemon curd, toasted hazelnut, apple pie and grilled bread with hints of earth and golden tones to the fruit. Deeply textural this is the most evolved of the three wines being disgorged, shows a complex nature immediately. Bright in the finish there is a small amount of dosage here, and it gives the slightest build to the fruit and softens the edges of the acidity. 162 cases disgorged with 1g/L dosage.
Willamette Valley Extra Brut $40 offer price ($50 retail)
70% Chardonnay and 30% Pinot Noir, comprised of fruit from the Whistling Ridge, Durant, Temperance Hill, and Tsai vineyards. Elevage is a mixture of neutral oak and acacia. It is both light bodied and ethereal, but with excellent texture and suppleness, moving through a range of aromatics: citrus, stone fruit, wheat fields, with touches of yeast esters, and a bit of stoniness. It’s both brightly fresh and yet texturally mature. Light in the mouth at 12.2%, it covers mineral notes, mandarins, and pastry dough. The polished elegance and refinement is balanced by a lovely freshness in the acidity, and the bottle disappears quite quickly. 162 cases disgorged with 2.5g/l dosage.
The 2022 Vintage: First Peek
Tasting the 2022 vintage feels like a combination of 2016’s supple fruit alongside the elegance of 2019. In the wines themselves it can be easy to forget that the 2022 vintage, for us, was defined by the freeze at bud break. It devastated Whistling Ridge, and impacted both Durant and Fir Crest heavily. The vines rebooted green growth, and the remainder of the growing season was relatively optimal, but the yields everywhere except Temperance Hill were miniscule. Given the low cluster counts, the vines had no issue ripening the fruit, and given the milder weather the flavors, numbers, and balance of the fruit was relatively perfect. Skins were modest in thickness, and these wines are extremely pretty, falling into florals and elegant expressions of ripe fruit. Silky and compelling, with just a hint of very fine tannins. Just a beautiful vintage, and one that we very much wish we had more of.
2022 Whistling Ridge Vineyard Pinot Noir $40 offer price ($50 retail)
Classic Whistling Ridge. Generous aromatically, with notes of rose petals, velvet, potpourri, strawberry, red cherry, pie spice, leather, and orange peel. The palate is bright red fruits, alpine strawberry, black cherry, more leather, with juicy acidity, darkening a bit as it opens and gaining depth. While the tannins are there, they are extraordinarily fine in this vintage, and the wine and should have an excellent window for drinking early, as well as cellaring in good fashion. 13.0% ABV, 100 cases produced.
2022 Temperance Hill Vineyard Pinot Noir $40 offer price ($50 retail)
So very Temperance Hill… Cedar and tobacco, mulberry, black raspberry, fresh ground coffee, graphite, flint and stone. The black and red fruits are there, but with so much mineral intertwined and flowing through. More forward aromatically than our wines sometimes are at this age, it’s elegant, medium bodied, with finesse in the mid-palate and then shifts into a sturdier finish with fine tannins that show good depth with modest astringency. 13.2% ABV, 150 cases produced.
2022 Durant Vineyard Pinot Noir $40 offer price ($50 retail)
Layered, elegant, with coffee and earth underlying boysenberry/black cherry fruit, violets, and yet loaded with finesse. The depth of the Dundee hills volcanic soils shows through, as does the vine age (25 years old! We’ve worked with these vines since they were 12). These vines sit halfway up the slope and face east into the morning sun. As they’ve aged they are slowly losing vigor and naturally finding a balance for the canopy, the layering gains depth while alcohols have become more modest. In five 500L puncheons, the quality was so consistent that we opted to forego a Heritage bottling from Durant this year and focus on maximizing quality in the vineyard designate. There will be a very good early window for drinking and then again from about 2029-2045. 12.9% ABV, 275 cases produced.
Spring Whites and Cellar Defenders
It has been three vintages of miniscule yields from 2020-2022, but in 2023 we finally got back on track. The vines had an abundance of energy and ripened a full crop at nearly record pace. Even the high elevation fruit at Temperance Hill was picked in September, though temperatures were never terribly hot. The vintage is defined by low sugars and good acidity, with brown seeds and lignified stems early on. Wines are pretty, showing early suppleness, excellent density at low abv, and lean toward elegant fruit layered over good structure.
2023 Willamette Valley Rosé of Pinot Noir $20 offer price ($25 retail)
Peach blossoms, wild strawberries, star fruit, green melon, light florals. This is very pretty in those nose, light bodied with plenty of flavor, and brightly refreshing to drink. The bottle disappears quickly. Perfect for sunny days watching the hummingbirds, grilling chicken, and sushi. 82% direct press from the blanc de noir program and 18% saignee from100% whole cluster ferments of Whistling Ridge and Durant. 12.3% abv and 266 cases produced.
2023 Whistling Ridge Riesling $24 offer price ($30 retail)
Lime peel, stone fruit, tangerine, rainier cherry, and river stones. Raised in an old 820L Acacia puncheon, this is textural and tranquil in the attack, then unfolds like a flower blossom in the palate with soft fruit and florals which give way to juicy, lingering acidity. Tasting this is entertaining, the original tranquility and supple texture suggests one direction, and then the explosion of nuance in the mid-palate reverses course, the acidity is soft and juicy but somehow sustains much longer than one would expect. This is one of my favorite versions of this wine. 11.1% abv and 86 cases produced
2023 Tsai Vineyard Pinot Blanc $20 offer price ($25 retail)
I love this wine…it’s my perfect combination of weightless, supple, and zingy. So refreshing…like fresh squeezed lemonade but add in bright aromas of pear and orchard fruit, along with a hint of pastry dough. The palate is bright, light-bodied, it wants to be snappy so badly but Pinot Blanc just has to be supple and textural…so. If Pinot Blanc were grown in Chablis this is what it would taste like. Perfect with simply prepared shellfish: oysters on the halfshell, scallops, crab, even lobster. 113 cases produced
2023 Willamette Valley “Vin Soif” Chardonnay $22.40 offer price ($28 retail)
Yellow apple, pear, lime flower and peel, almonds, hints of tarragon and pastry dough. In the mouth, it’s more yellow apples and pear, underripe nectarine, lime peel, and a distinct stoniness. Bottled a year early from our normal Chardonnay program, the impetus for this wine was to push for a pretty, nervy, and slightly less lees inflected wine for everyday enjoyment. 12.0% abv and 198 cases produced.
