Felt this deserved its own thread, these wines are a purchase for me every release, killer QPR.
The Wines (In More Detail):
First up this release is the 2022 Gravity’s Pull Chardonnay. It’s one of the best versions of the wine we’ve made—it’s easy to point to when making the case that this vintage is the best collection in our winery’s short history. As always, this comes from ungrafted vines in Dion Vineyard, and it has some of the tension and brightness of the ‘19 with a bit of the richness of the ‘21. It’s beautifully balanced between delicate fruit and minerality, and you can (and should) pour it for your Burgundy-only friends.
This is always from Dion Vineyard and its ungrafted, 30+ year-old Chardonnay vines, planted in windblown loess soils. It’s telling that across Europe, producers who are lucky enough to have ungrafted vineyards prize them supremely for the je ne sais quoi they seem to provide. Every time we taste Gravity’s Pull, we think that must be happening here, as well, and we’re grateful to get to work with the vineyard. This wine fermented and aged for eleven months in older oak barrels before we transferred it into stainless steel tanks for a final six months to build tension into the wine. We only make a tiny amount: one puncheon and two barrique’s worth of wine this vintage—less than 125 cases. Full retail is $37, but for the next two weeks the mailing-list price is $29.
Lost Coastlines Pinot Noir in 2022 certainly reflects the excellent vintage, but it’s also fair to say it equally reflects how much we learned in our second year working with Fir Crest Vineyard’s Pinot Noir. It’s a site that we believe to be the most interesting in all of the prestigious Yamhill-Carlton AVA, but whose reputation hadn’t yet caught up to its quality. The 2022 shows a bit more red fruit than the ‘21, and the tannins—while certainly present—have a refinement that reflects our year-over-year improvement in winemaking.
We swore we wouldn’t make Pinot Noir until there was an overwhelmingly compelling reason to do it—which is to say, until we could source grapes from an absolutely top-tier vineyard. Made entirely from Fir Crest Vineyard, which we’d submit as the single most compelling vineyard in Yamhill-Carlton, it’s a wine of real personality and vibrancy that’s built for the cellar. We debated pricing this in line with the “prestige” Yamhill bottlings in its quality-class (aka $60-$75+) but fundamentally we’d rather have this in your cellars in enough quantity that you can drink it over time. Just 70 cases exist. Retail is $42, mailing-list pricing is $34.
Finally, the 2023 A Thousand Dreams is a wine that ended up embodying our Friuli-meets-Oregon idea like few others. The short version is that it’s a field blend of Ribolla Gialla, Tocai Friulano, and Pinot Noir, all harvested together from the same block and pressed as a white wine. Or, at least, white was the idea: despite gentle pressing, A Thousand Dreams is very gently pink. But it still drinks like a white wine, and one that’s exceptionally food friendly, as well.
All together, we ended up with barely a ton of grapes to go into this—just enough to fill a 500L puncheon and a small stainless steel tank. That amounts to just 68 cases of wine, which is perfectly suited to both winter and summer drinking. Full retail will be $36, but it’s just $27 for the next two weeks.
There’s finally a bit more wine available this fall: It’s been really flattering to sell out the last few releases, but it’s more exciting to have it in your cellars and on your tables. Production is still not huge, but we’ve been able to keep the winery growing—thanks in large part to your support. If you can, please spread the word if you think you know someone who might like these wines.
Thank you again for your support. The winery has been successful beyond what we could have hoped at this stage, and it’s something we don’t take for granted.
