My search is finally over. I have
tasted hundreds of Oregon Pinot Noirs. I have purchased and cellared thousands
of dollars in Oregon Pinot Noir. Top quality Oregon juice can run you $85-$125
or so from producers like Ken Wright, Archery Summit, Beaux Feres and Joseph
Drouhin. The good “entry-level” stuff costs about $28-$35 -- at
that price range I happen to enjoy producers like Cristom, Coattails, Big Farm
Table and Bergstrom.
A great thing about Oregon Pinot
Noir is that there is a lot of adequate buys in the market from vintage to
vintage. My goal is to sort through all of that to find the exceptional
stuff. Usually I conduct this research on our annual trip to Willamette
Valley Oregon, Memorial weekend, when most of the wineries are open to the
public.
On this occasion, I was home for the
evening with my fiancé Danielle, when I decided to grab a bottle from my
personal collection to go with dinner. At the last second of my indecisiveness,
while staring at a wall of Pinot Noir, I grabbed a bottle of Oregon Gamay Noir that I had purchased from a local wine merchant several months prior. A rarity in the US, Gamay is a grape that is stylistically similar to Pinot
Noir; equally suited to grow in the same climate’s as Pinot; but having a
lesser reputation due to it’s often stylistic simplicity (the Beaujoilas
Nouveau holiday wine boom in the 1980’s and 1990’s didn’t help it’s status
either).
Although relatively new to the market
place, my bottle of choice was from a fairly well known winery named, Evening Land. At
first sip this wine became the most significant bottling that I may have ever
encountered in my 5 years of consuming Oregon wine, and turned my light bodied
Oregon red wine research on it’s head! The 2011 Seven Springs Gamay Noir was priced at just $20. I will be rushing
back out tomorrow morning to purchase more--you may want do the same.
If you blind tasted me and told me it was top quality Burgundy, I would have no problem believing you. While this
Gamay might not be more complex than some Oregon or French Pinots, it may be the most
well made wine in Oregon. I can’t get over the focus that this wine has. The
cranberry, cherry skin and pomegranate flavors are absolutely precise. I can
quite easily pick up on the herbaceous whole cluster qualities that help
contribute to this wine’s delicate structure. It has me wanting to compare it
to a violin. As it opens up well into the second hour in the decantor, a lovely
perfumed rose pedal like texture and flavor is slowly building in volume and sound.
The acidity on this wine is absolutely perfect. It’s nice to see something that
can play in the same league as top dollar Oregon Pinot Noir, for this little
charmer will forever be my benchmark Oregon wine.
