“ Intensely aromatic, deeply flavored, dense, extracted, textural, and crystalline.
The keystone of my work is leveraging attention, curiosity and energy, into the world of Willamette Valley chardonnay: the 2024 vintage is the eleventh of Morgen Long, and is composed of exactly one hundred barrels, harvested over thirty gloriously leisurely days. This extended harvest window allowed for each block at every vineyard to have its own cadence and apex, its own moment.
In the cellar over the past eighteen months, every detail has been attended to; the block and site demeanor, the disposition of the vintage, each barrel has transformed, made boundless by its own spirit. The final blends have been refined by time, and bottling is scheduled for the week of spring equinox.
The long harvest window and the scintillating reduction in the 2024 vintage is reminiscent of 2019, though the acidity is higher, as is the quality of phenolics. The 2024 Morgen Long Willamette Valley Chardonnays are truly magnificent expressions of grape, time and place.”
If I’m not mistaken, it seems like a few of the prices are a bit lower. Seth makes some fantastic Chardonnays, and I am sure that his 2024s will be well worth it.
The XO is particularly interesting as it’s half the price of the X Omni, yet is comprised of X Omni juice, with the only difference being the barrels
A barrel selection from X Omni, three barrels from one cooper: La Fabrique Eric Millard. The new barrel in this is bottling is called Atlantique, it’s staves are ‘seasoned’ underwater an oyster bed on the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux.
This is fascinating. Anyone ever had a wine made in such a barrel?
@Erica_O_r_r Mentioned doing a tasting of a Granville chardonnay from this type of barrel during her recent Willamette visit. Maybe she can weigh in on what it brought to the wine!
Interesting. A friend served the 2022 on Thursday, and it was superb. But he said it was substantially more than $65 – $80 or $85 if I recall.
My only other experience with their wines was the 2017 Pink Label ($25 in 2019), which was tart to point of being shrill young but fleshed out really nicely by 2024, with an appealing hint of red pinot fruit on the nose.
Yeah, I’m very curious about the XO. I ordered a single bottle to taste, and if I enjoy it enough, I may order a few more.
That said, I’m even more excited about the regular X Omni. Low yields, crushing before pressing, long, hard press cycles, and 100% new French oak — that’s a rare combination. There are plenty of producers in Burgundy who pursue a more extractive, high-solids style, but not many who pair that approach with such a high percentage of new oak. Paul Pillot and Lamy-Caillat are two examples who work in a more extractive vein, though with lower percentages of new oak and PYCM is somewhere in the middle. Don’t get me wrong — I adore Paul Pillot, Lamy-Caillat and PYCM — but I do wish more producers would experiment with high percentages of new oak. It seems to be out of vogue in general. That said, a few who embrace it — d’Auvenay and William Kelley, for example — seem to make pretty compelling wines.
Kristaps Karklins from the Wine Advocate wrote a great instagram post explaining how this extractive, high-solids winemaking style leads to a more robust Chardonnay that can digest high percentages of new oak gracefully. It also looks like Seth has expanded his cooperage beyond Damy, adding François Frères and Chassin to the mix.
That’s a long-winded way of saying: I have high hopes for the cellaring potential of these wines.
I bought the 2021 Eola-Amity Hills at retail in NY. It was $75. But that year it was 100% Koosah, just wasn’t labeled as such. The reason I bought the 21s was that the 2022 pricing did take a big jump. I’m sure there’s a thread on it here in WB
Hm - don’t love that. It says $0.00 shipping to my zip code on the Checkout screen with the total price being the sum of the bottles and Buy button being right under that. May send him an email
