WELCOME!
For those Berserkers who know us, it is great to see you again. For those who have never heard of us, it’s nice to meet you. Akiko and I are wife and husband and also business partners. We tend three small vineyard parcels and make about 1000 cases of wine per year in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
As always, our offers are at the beginning of our post. If you want detailed information about the wines, to learn more about us or to play a game to win some wine, please scroll down a bit further. I have tried to streamline our offer section to make sure you have time to see all the great BD16 offers.
This year we have 7 wines from the 2022 vintage (4 Pinot noir and 3 whites including our first ever Chardonnay). We have 4 mixed case options, 2 smaller sized Introductory packs and a library offering. We leave it up to you: build your own case or pick a mixed pack.
OFFERS!
2022 PINOT NOIRSBerserkers First! These are pre-release wines. Berserkers get these before our club, before our distributors, before our favorite restaurants and even before family! Although the wines are pre-release, you can absolutely drink them now, but the longer you wait, the better they’ll get.
- 2022 Willamette Cuvée (Willamette Valley AVA) - Retail $29, BD16 Price $23 / bottle
- 2022 Havlin Single Vineyard (Van Duzer Corridor AVA) - Retail $42, BD16 Price $33 / bottle
- 2022 Nuestro Sueño Single Vineyard (Eola Amity Hills AVA) - Retail $42, BD16 Price $33 / bottle
- 2022 Bellevue Cross Single Vineyard (McMinnville AVA) - Retail $42, BD16 Price $33 / bottle
- 2022 Mixed Pinot noir case – 3 each of 1-4 above - Retail $465, BD16 Price $365 shipped.
- Mystery Library-bottle case – Same as #5, but only 2 bottles of Willamette Cuvée. The 12th bottle will be a “randomly chosen” library wine: Pinot noir between 2014-2019. Maybe single vineyard. Maybe Willamette Cuvée - Retail $475+, BD16 Price $385 shipped.
- Library Offer - 2017 Three bottle set - Willamette Cuvée, Havlin single vineyard and Lewman single vineyard. Down to our last few commercial bottles on these. SOLD OUT
NOTE: More detailed information about vineyards and vinification of each wine can be found below.
2022 WHITE WINES
This is the second time some of you are seeing two of these wines. The timing is too early for us to start even pre-releasing our 2023 whites. The good news is that we still have tiny bit of the 2022 whites, which have all grown in stature immensely since release. We also have our first ever Chardonnay release for you.
- 2022 Willamette blanc – Pinot gris, Auxerrois, Pinot noir – Retail $23, BD16 Price $19 / bottle
- 2022 Havlin Auxerrois – 100% Auxerrois – Retail $27, BD16 Price $22 / bottle
- 2022 Havlin Chardonnay – Retail $40, BD16 Price $32 / bottle
- 2022 White-wine mixed-case – 4 of each of our 2022 white wines. – Retail $360, BD16 Price $280 shipped.
- 2022 Mixed Pinot noir and white wine case – 2 x 2022 Willamette Cuvée, 2 x Each 2022 Single vineyard Pinot noir, 2 x 2022 Willamette blanc, 1 x 2022 Chardonnay, 1 x 2022 Havlin Auxerrois – Retail $423, BD16 Price $338 shipped.
INTRODUCTORY PACKSThese are for designed for people who don’t know us but want to give our wines a try. Low risk and hopefully high reward for you.
- 2022 Pinot noir Intro-pack - 1 each of Willamette Cuvee, Havlin, Nuestro Sueno and Bellevue Cross single vineyard bottlings. BD16 Price $152 Shipped.
- 2022 Red & White Intro-pack - Same as above plus 1 each of our Chardonnay and Auxerrois. BD16 Price $206 Shipped.
SHIPPING
- We cannot ship to UT, AR, MS, DE.
- AK, HI, RI contact us before ordering.
- Most other states we can usually figure out a way to get your wine to you.
- Use coupon code BD16 for “included shipping” on orders equal to or over $276 (that’s the price of 12 bottles of Willamette Cuvée, FYI). We can’t offer “Free shipping” on wine, but we can include it in the price of the wine for $0! Thus, the term “included shipping.”
- We are offering flat-rate discounted shipping for orders under $276 - $50 for a case & $35 for a six pack. Orders other than 6 or 12 packs are shipped at our standard rate.
- All orders ship in April 2025.
- If you have any questions or concerns, email or direct message BEFORE ordering.
“PLAY STUPID GAMES. WIN FREE WINE.”
New year. New game.
We are a very small production winery. To illustrate that I present the pictures below. That is our entire production of Pinot noir for the 2022 vintage, which is the Pinot noir we are offering in BD16. The game is simple. Guess how many cases of each of our four Pinot noir bottlings we produced. I think you can get pretty close by looking at the photo below, but some bottlings will be harder to estimate from the pic than others.
The first person to guess correctly for each bottling, wins a free bottle of that wine. If no one guesses correctly, the person who guesses closest first wins. You can guess once for each of the four bottlings.
Rules / Details – games are fun, but they’re funner when they’re fair and the rules are clear.*
- You must place an order to play. Your order doesn’t have to include the wine(s) that you are guessing.
- One guess per person per bottling, which means you get four guesses total. (In theory one person could win for all four bottlings.)
- Reply to this thread with your guesses.
- If you win, I will refund the value of the bottling that you guessed correctly. This works better than sending an extra bottle, because of shipping costs and wine-shipping-box sizes. If you guessed correctly, but didn’t happen to buy that bottling, I will still refund the appropriate value.
- I reserve the right to change to rules. I won’t do this unless I need to fix a problem with my rules.
- Don’t “cheat.” Everything is on the internet somewhere including our production numbers. I pulled them off the website in anticipation of this game, but if you are interweb savvy, you know how to find them.
MORE WINE INFORMATION
2022 Pinot noir: This was a low yield vintage for us. Our Bellevue Cross site was hit pretty hard by a late frost. Havlin and Nuestro Sueño also felt the frost effects, but not as dramatically. This is also the first vintage that we made in our facility in Willamina.
As always each site was hand-picked and field-sorted by a team of our family and friends using 30 lbs fruit totes. After I haul the grapes to the winery, they are sorted a second time on our sorting line before heading either directly into the fermenter or to the destemmer and then the fermenter. Each site and vintage get different amounts of whole cluster in the fermenter.
The weather is dark, but look at all those bright happy smiles…because they’re done picking for the day…Nothing (no S02, no yeast food, no yeast) but a pied de Cuvée is added to the fermenters. Pied de Cuvée is a couple of gallons of grape juice made from grapes that we pick early and allow to start fermenting under optimal conditions. Adding this to the fermenter gets the process going more quickly which minimizes the risk of any unwanted yeasts getting establish.
In the fermenter we are extremely gentle! We don’t do punch-downs and rarely do delastage (draining out the liquid from and then pouring it back in to fermenters) on the fermenting grapes. Typically, we do some foot-treading to mix the fermenters (to achieve uniformity of temperature and yeast activity) and keep the grapes on top wet (again to minimize risk of unwanted yeast, bacteria or fungus in the fermenter).
Pigéage! Who does it better?Once we determine that it’s time (the criteria for this varies by vintage, vineyard and fermenter) the wine is pressed off the skins and returned to the fermenter for the another week or two to continue fermenting. Barrelling-down is done via gravity and siphon only. In fact, the only time a pump is used ever on any wine of ours is immediately after pressing and the only reason we use a pump for that is because we can’t use gravity (yet!). While it may sound like we enjoy doing things the hard way, it is all about being gentle to the wine.
Every single cluster gets checked again on the sorting table.Barrel-aging last for 14 to 20 months depending on when we feel the wines are ready to be bottled. Sometimes we wish we could go longer, but we don’t have space and can’t afford to barrel age three vintages in the cellar simultaneously. Blending and bottling are again done sans pump and the wines are left to bottle age another 8 to 14 months before official release. (Official release for Willamette Cuvée is May each year and September for single vineyard bottlings.)
Into the bottle with the 2022 Auxerrois. By hand six bottles at a time.
2022 Willamette Cuvée – Retail $29, BD16 Price $23 / bottle
[pH 3.6, 13.5% ABV, aged in neutral french oak for 23 months, bottled on October 26, 2024, native yeast fermentation, no filtering or fining, no additions except a tiny bit of SO2]
The Willamette Cuvée is the blend that we create first. As we start tasting through barrels for blending about 6 months before bottling, we try to identify the barrels we want for the Willamette Cuvée. We do this because we have a specific style in mind for the WC. We make trial blends, taste, adjust, taste, adjust, rinse and repeat until we think we’ve found the ideal blend for WC.
Once we’ve made an initial selection for the WC, we do trial blends for the single vineyard bottlings. The cynical reader will think that we are putting the “left over” barrels in the more expensive bottling, there aren’t any “left over” barrels. Barrels for the WC aren’t chosen because they are individually objectively better, but because they contribute to a better blend.
2022 Single vineyard Pinot noirs
For the single vineyard blends the goal is to highlight the character of each vineyard, not our wine-making or stylistic preferences. Of course, it is impossible for us to not influence the wine at all, because we are the ones making it, but we try minimized our influence. Luckily for us the vineyards tend to do this on their own anyway. The wines from each vineyard are so different from each other and from the Willamette Cuvee
2022 Havlin Single Vineyard - Retail $42, BD16 Price $33 / bottle
[pH 3.65, 13.9% ABV, aged in neutral french oak for 24 months, bottled on November 23, 2024, no fining or filtering, native yeast ferment, minimal SO2 (<30 ppm total)]
Havlin is always our most Oregon-typical Pinot noir in my opinion. Black cherries, currants and a touch of cinnamon and clove. For 2022 the Havlin is currently showing with a very rich tannic presence, but is balanced by the high-ish (13.9%) alcohol. Right now it is probably best enjoyed with relatively hardy foods, but over the coming years it will certainly settle down and be pairable with nothing more than the glass its poured in.
2022 Nuestro Sueño Single Vineyard - Retail $42, BD16 Price $33 / bottle
[pH 3.6, 13.0% ABV, aged in neutral french oak for 19 months, bottled on June 22, 2024, no fining or filtering, native yeast ferment, minimal SO2 (<30 ppm total)]
As much as we know we shouldn’t pick favorite children, we find that more and more lately Neustro Sueño is really the darling amongst our offerings. More often than not the customer favorite at tastings, it’s low alcohol elegant mouthfeel appeals belies its depth and complexity. Great for pairing with much lighter fare that normally doesn’t “go with” red wines.
2022 Bellevue Cross Single Vineyard - Retail $42, BD16 Price $33 / bottle
[pH 3.6, 13.9% ABV, aged in neutral french oak for 19 months, bottled June 22, 2024, no fining or filtering, native yeast ferment, minimal SO2 (<30 ppm total) ]
It is hard to believe that Bellevue Cross and Momtazi both come from the McMinnville AVA, because they are pretty far apart in style. Where Momtazi is the king of intensity, Bellevue teases. Was that blueberry? Or was maybe just blackberry flowers? Black tea or black pepper? Something floral or just typical pommard clone tones? The nose is still quite closed, but that is typical of this site. What will be the dominant tone when it opens is anyones guess. It’s a tease. Pleasantly saline on the pallet and some delicate tannic structure helps balance the relatively high alcohol.
2022 White wines
Akiko got her viticulture and enology education in Germany. So, making white wine has always been a big goal for us. The natural choice coming from Germany was Riesling, but we never found the right taste for Riesling in Oregon. Not to say Oregon Riesling is bad, but it wasn’t the Riesling style that we were looking for. So, we kept searching and eventually found an acre of Auxerrios that also had some Pinot gris planted at the edge. In 2017 we started farming this little block and having been making a 100% Auxerrois white and an Auxerrois, Pinot gris, Pinot noir blend since.
2022 Willamette blanc – Pinot gris, Auxerrois, Pinot noir – Retail $23, BD16 Price $19 / bottle
[140 cases, pH 3.38, 11.5% ABV, Skin contact (partial), mix of Acacia puncheon, neutral oak and stainless, native yeast fermentation, no filtering or fining, no additions except a tiny bit of SO2]
For 2022 we changed up the blend a little bit. Normally, the Willamette blanc is primarily Auxerrois (~70%) with a little Pinot gris (~20%) and a little Pinot noir rosé (~10%). In 2022 the blend was 49% Pinot gris, 29% Auxerrois and 22% Pinot noir rosé.
As always it’s aged in a combination of neutral oak, acacia puncheon and stainless steel tank. Bright, tart and refreshing this wine stands on its own without any food pairing, but it’s my choice for fried chicken and tonkatsu. Regardless of how you drink it, the 2022 vintage is showing really well! Perhaps it is the higher Pinot gris content or perhaps we finally figured out what we’re doing. Most likely we just got lucky!
2022 Havlin Auxerrois – 100% Auxerrois – Retail $27, BD16 Price $22 / bottle
[107 cases, pH 3.28, 12% ABV, Short skin contact, Acacia puncheon aged, native yeast fermentation, no filtering or fining, no additions except a tiny bit of SO2]
Our goal with this wine is to let the Auxerrois express itself. Uggh, that sounds cheesy and cliché, but it’s true. A little bit of skin contact and a little over a year in the acacia puncheon really give the typically light and gentle Auxerrois the extra intensity and structure to let it speak loudly, but remain well balanced and fresh.
Across the aisle from our Auxerrois block is a Chardonnay block that we would always snack on before, during and after working in the Auxerrois block. We were always very Chardonnay-curious, but never really trusted ourselves. In 2022 we finally went for it and took over the Chardonnay block at Havlin vineyard that was closes to our Auxerrois. Our original plan was to get about a ton of grapes from this tiny block, but the spring frosts of 2022 slashed our yield to about a three quarters of a ton.
2022 Havlin Chardonnay – Retail $40, BD16 Price $32 / bottle
[40 cases, pH 3.43, 12.2% ABV, aged in new french oak (60%) and Stainless for 13 months, native yeast fermentation, no filtering or fining, no additions except a tiny bit of SO2]
The basics of how we made this wine are the same as all of our other wines. Wild yeast ferment, no fining or filtering and very limited SO2 additions. We used one new very special french oak barrel (chosen specifically for its gentle touch) and a small stainless steel tank for aging. Bottling was done April 2024.
So how did we do? It’s not perfect in that it’s fairly linear (opposite of complex…), but that is to be expected from such a small batch. It is, however, absolutely proof that we can do Chardonnay our way. Citrusy and fresh on the nose. Tart and taught on the palette without being sharp or harsh. The 60% new french oak is noticeable, but it is the accent that it should be not the attention grabbing highlight. Most of all it tastes like Chardonnay without smashing you over the head with its Chardonnay-ness. That sentence probably seems like word-salad, but for us the biggest stylistic issue with Chardonnay is that it often gets so over-amplified that it becomes a caricature of itself. We wanted to avoid that at all costs, but we wanted the wine to still present as Chardonnay. I think we achieved that goal.
“WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?”
I try to write something new and unique about who we are and what we are up to every year. I try to present a different perspective or focus on a particular point each time I write. This year I’d like to provide an entirely different perspective. Here is a link to what one of our beloved local wine shops, E & R Wines, had to say about us. I just hope that someday we live up to what they said about us in the article.
THANKS FOR VISITINGWe hope you enjoyed my tome and perhaps found something you like amongst our offerings. I (Chris) am stuck in training and meetings for most of BD16. I will pop in when I can, but the real brains and muscle behind our wines will be here in this thread helping. She is a Berserker newbie. So, please be kind to her. @AkikoShiba.