While my sample is limited, I’ve always found 2008 to be a curious, if not anachronistic vintage—at least from the Oregon producers that I’d sampled. I think your comments finally helped shed some light on why they’ve puzzled me—with the cooling weather allowing for producers to push ripeness without sacrificing much acid.
They are lovely. I’ve found most of them really dense and concentrated, with bigger extractions and many with alc. levels 13.5 and above. Nothing wrong with that at all, but seldom characteristics I’d usually attribute to a cool vintage. Cameron is one of the few ones I’m aware of that had most of his wines in the 12% range.
There’s certainly some winemaking best practices that have also changed since. I think like you, other producers are also pushing to pick earlier than before to preserve more acid and vineyard best practices have improved as well
2008 was a really cool(figuratively, but less so literally) vintage. Small clusters and ripening in October gernerally yields great potential if weather holds. And 2008s seemed to be a “vintage of the century” type of year for those into the hyperbole. There was almost universal excitement among the winemakers in Oregon for the vintage and on release the wines were remarkably delicious. But as they closed down, they really, really closed down. Dense fruit, little nuance, and the 13.5+ showed as a kind of ponderous quality. There’s more than one thread on this board questioning whether it was actually a great vintage, understandably given the hype early on and how long the dumb phase lasted. The 2008 Winter’s Hill was the first 2008 we made to open back up, everything else took more than a decade. Though at this point, I think all of the 2008s are showing well. (The 2008 Bishop Creek is one of those weird wines that smells over the hill for 20-30 minutes and then opens up into a really lovely wine.)
There is a movement to picking earlier these days. It’s great to see that happening. It’s also interesting because there are definitely still producers in the “as much hang time as possible” camp, but just about everyone realizes that we can reach potential alcohols well above what was possible 40 years ago. There also seems to be a good middle ground picking ripe flavors and making good wines but still focused around the fruit (even the Jadot Oregon wines really seem to fall into this category for me). And then a few people really looking for brighter, crunchier wines who are more focused on finding ways to pick when sugars are still low. It gives consumers a lot of options to find wines that suit their particular style, but it does make it more challenging to sort out specific aspects of sites when one person picks at 21 Brix and the next picks at 24.5 Brix.
I have always been shocked at how much Pinot Noir will move from bright red fruit in youth towards the darker fruits as it ages. Over the years we have definitely begun to push towards picking the moment the fruit is ready. Currently, I am struck by the 2017s in bottle as a good proof of this. Every one that we have opened recently has great density and fruit to balance the structure and acidity(in a “don’t open this for another 3-5 years” way). That year I remember being in the thick of it, just slammed with fruit, ferments, and getting caught up from bringing everything in. Our winery space is in town, and one afternoon I saw a friend cruising by on his way to the coffee shop. He looked fresh and was dressed in clean(and nice) clothes. It surprised me enough to both be envious and to ask how much fruit they had brought in. His answer was 4%, and at the time I kind of wondered if I had jumped the gun as we had everything but Temperance Hill in the cellar (over 85% of our fruit). But tasting the 2017s now, I am incredibly happy with that vintage. As much as we in the industry pride ourselves on knowing when the fruit is at the perfect point, I suspect that a lot of us wait until the fruit is sweet(and flavorful) bypassing a very good window that historically was where a lot of old wirld wines were picked at (weather forecasts are new technology for winemakers, and accurate ones are very new in an industry that is 7000 years old). And while many say there is more good wine being made right now than ever before, I think that really there is just more safe wine being made. We worry too much over whether people will like the wines we make, and in our worry go beyond ripeness levels that work to ripeness levels that leave no doubt the wines will be fruit driven (and enjoyable to many). But my favorite vintages are mostly ones where either Mother Nature demands picking before winemaker think we should (2005 and 2010) or ones where we pick earlier than my 2008 self would think is intelligent (2017 and 2019).
I am really, really glad you got a bottle of that and that it showed as hoped.
The first one we opened was, as you emailed me, a holy f#@k! wine. The second was still good but the cork was definitely not holding up as well as the first bottle, and the wine didn’t come close to the first. We opened a third before offering that wine for the library sale, where we had 10 bottles to sell…(burn 3 to sell 10, no wonder the wine industry is full of crazy people). Thankfully, the third was in line with the first. It’s still a bit nuts to see the curve on the 2010 Clover as well. i had incredibly high hopes for that wine. But it went into a very long dumb phase. Good but not great. I basically forgot about the bottles we had, still hoping but also not holding my breath. We tasted the first bottle in a sort the library evening. Some people rent a movie, some of us dig out pallets of old wine and move cases around looking for what’s good, what’s great, and what should be poured out. I honestly didn’t have a clue which category that wine would belong in.
But I do think the 2021 Whistling Ridge Pinot Gris has a lot of opportunity to age in a similar way, so we chose to believe in the wine and used the Diam 30 on it. It is super tasty now, and to Chris C.’s earlier point, is much more in the Alto Adige style(if they used Acacia) or patterned after a lower abv version of the Vie de Romans style of Pinot Gris.
I have yet to taste the 2021 PG, but I’m a fan of cool climate Italian whites so Chris’s note is very encouraging. And many of those wines are unappreciated for their ability to age when well made. Those who do not cellar any of WR PG will be gnashing their teeth in despair ten years from now.
I opened a 2010 Clover Pinot Gris and thought it was fantastic, would not have expected 12 year old Oregon PG to be that incredible. I gather it was the structure that made it turn out so well. I also opened a 2021 Pinot Gris and plan to sit on the others.
I’m not disparaging the 08 wines by any stretch. I’ve enjoyed many of the 08’s I’ve tried recently from the likes of Patricia Green, Evesham Wood, Cristom, Cameron, Thomas, and St. Innocent. And for what it’s worth, the Winter’s Hill I opened was the favourite wine of the night for multiple people that evening.
I’ll have to search for those 08 threads, sounds like a fun and educational read.
Funnily enough I have the complete opposite mindset when it comes to this. I see a variety of different wine-growing and winemaking styles from a single vineyard serving as a great tool to highlight that site typicity. While differences in wine-growing and winemaking can result in vastly different wines, comparing them allows for the commonalities that underscore all of them to shine through. Berserkers can then argue over which of those vineyard and cellar practices best suits the site.
I think it’s both. There is a lot of wine being made right now (and not just in Oregon) that is stupendous. The combination of technology, technical knowledge, and vine age results in some stunning wines. At the same time, I also agree with you that that are many winemakers afraid of taking chances and end up making good, but not great wines. It’s a tough balance between passionately taking a risk and ensuring one is able to successfully sell their wines. So I can empathise with winemakers choosing the safe route, even if I may prefer they take the other.
I do think that certain styles of wines are increasingly harder to make in some wine regions now especially as the effects of climate change take hold. A few weeks ago I was at dinner with a few friends and one of them opened up an 88 Clusel-Roch Cote Rotie. It was incredibly young, dense and concentrated, firing on all cylinders, and surprisingly only 12.5% ABV. In drinking and talking about that wine, discussion came around to how often regions like Northern Rhone can make wines like that with current climate conditions—and whether a cooler vintage in a warmer climate can mimic a warmer vintage in a cooler climate. I’m not sure. I suspect some characteristics can shared, I suspect the ripening conditions are different are not quite the same.
Ultimately wine is an agricultural product, and vintage can play as much a role, if not more in how a wine turns out. As much as I have my own preferences in what I look for in wine, I think it’s much better when winemakers have flexibility and a raison d’être approach to wine growing and winemaking, than to dogmatically stick to a strict formula.
I love seeing this commentary from a winemaker — thank you for this, Marcus!
A short little story that goes in this file:
Once upon a time, there was a winemaker who had some of their wines reviewed by a major publication. These wines were early-on in the winemaker’s career making wines for their own label. This major publication handed-out some scores that were pretty bad. As far as I was concerned, these wines were hit-and-miss, but the hits were really good. Over time, after that, the winemaking under this label seemed to shift to the middle; the hit-and-miss nature of the lineup largely dissipated in favor of more even performance across the board. The misses largely disappeared, but so did the hits. The wines were “well-made,” but no longer exciting in the way some of them used to be. I stopped buying.
Moral of the story: Don’t play it safe. Follow your gut. Trust your instinct. Do what you think is right!
(But first. I didn’t think you were disparaging the Winter’s Hill or 08s at all. My comments are 100% generated by a winemaker’s view of his own past work. In my experience, most of us struggle with wanting to go back in time and re-do some of our choices. Or just to be able to apply our current skills on wines we made before acquiring the knowledge we have now.
I’m proud of my 08s, they were the best work I was capable of at the time. I am also very fond of them because they generated some of the most crucial evolution that I have undergone, at first philosophically and then following that up in the cellar.)
Regarding climatic changes and the possible overlap of cool vintages in a warm climate and warm vintages in a cool climate, I probably have more thoughts than I can intelligently express tonight, but…one thought.
Regarding terroir we often begin, and sometimes end, with the soil. But the latitude of a vineyard is probably the most enduring vector of the idea of terroir. The further away from the equator you get, the bigger the variance in length of day/night between summer and winter. While that variance is bigger through the year, the cycle varies very little. Year after year after year spring moves into summer then to fall, and the length of the day through that cycle is something the vines, and plants in general, are very attuned to. When to bud out first leaves, when to bloom, when to shut down green growth, when to ripen fruit, when to shed leaves.
The vineyard soils will erode and change and evolve long before the impacts of latitude will alter in a meaningful way.
To give an example of why this matters and to tie it specifically to to your topic. In the Willamette Valley at the 45th parallel, the shift in length of days between summer solstice and autumnal equinox is quite substantial. So regardless of whether the weather is warm, the vines will begin the lignification process. In a warm vintage they may look less brown but you can still use significant amounts of stems. It’s my feeling that the difference in latitude will maintain a difference between a hot Oregon vintage and say, a cooler Napa vintage. Though in ripe years, I have definitely tasted a number of OR wines that were misidentified in tastings as CA Pinot Noir, though none using significant amounts of stems.
19 Richards Cuvée Chard. Short Impression: Lean, mean and mineral driven machine… Little in the way of specific fruit descriptors but maxed out to geological stuff. Just excellent. Letting my last two bottles simmer for 5 plus years.
I probably have zero experience with straight CF and definitely zero for OR CF. Decanted two hours. It had an expected deep Cab red hue. The nose was all meaty, dark fruit, and herbaceous - like a seared duck breast with blackberries and thyme reduction. Still fairly tannic with black pepper spice, this could hold for years still but is drinking quite well. Pair it with a big honkin’ grilled steak for lip-smacking delight.
I’m a fan of that bottling. Already consumed two as a test drive and I rarely crack GF reds that young. Definitely holding my remaining bottles for awhile.
I hope he makes more in the future, although pretty sure it won’t be in the 19-21 vintages.
Marcus, if you’re wavering on future vintages, I’ll keep nagging and encouraging you.
Yes, that is exactly correct. In 2018 we had half a barrel of CF from Whistling Ridge.
Since then we’ve had a run of really poor yields from the CF and haven’t been able to justify doing it. TBH it’s not really possible to justify 12 cases either…but it was still fun.
I haven’t had the opportunity to try Goodfellow CF, but if you’re looking to try some others from Oregon, Martin Woods releases one that I find tasty. (though it’s Walla Walla and not WV)
