I had some interesting questions from a wine reviewer about terroir recently. I was talking about certain aromatics I find in my own wine and the reviewer was skeptical, rightly so I might ad, and pushed me to think about it a bit more.

Most of you are familiar with the term but for those who are not terroir describes the physical elements of a particular agricultural site, the soil, the elevation, orientation, everything naturally about the site that influences the agricultural product. In this case we are talking about vineyards.

But understanding terroir even in the Northern Willamette Valley where we are dealing with one prominant grape variety, Pinot Noir, is easier said than done. We do have a leg up in that we have many single site Pinot Noirs but the majority of wine is blended from different sites. We also have one notable large vineyard, Shea, produced under many different labels. Compounding the issue is the fact that we have several clones grown on the same site with nuanced differences.

Finally, wine professionals and consumers alike do ascribe many wine aromatics due to processing or bad wine making as terroir. How many times have I set next to a consumer explaining how distinct a particular Pinot Noir is because of the vineyard aroma they are picking up. I call it reduction which is far too prevalent in Oregon Pinot Noir. There is also Brettanomyces, a spoilage yeast which people ascribe to terroir. Perhaps a little more plausible because the yeast can come from the vineyard, but more likely the lives in the winery.

But there is not doubt that terroiris discernable in wines and especially in single site Oregon Pinot Noir. It is probably easier than you think to discern it but you have to invest in the wines of a single site, from a single producer over time; or just talk to the winemaker or vineyard owner who has worked with the fruit over time.

2010 LeNez Pinot Noir

Last night I opened a bottle of 2010 LeNez Pinot Noir, the terroir coming through plain as day to me. I know that Lenné wines have two terroir driven attributes, a mocha aromatic and a certain texture on the back of the mid palate.It is consistent from vintage to vintage and as certain as the sun coming up.  There is no denying the mocha aromatic, it has been in every wine we have ever produced. It is a signature that makes Lenné wines distinct, unlike any other that I have had. And the texture on the mid palate is what makes wine satisfying to me. And the aroma and texture are from the site, no doubt about it.

They probably come mostly from the soil than anything else, but that is a topic for another time.

I would love to hear the impression of people from California about Oregon Pinot Noir. I think Oregonians have a more provincial view than their California counterparts. Maybe provincial is the wrong work, maybe “protective” is a better phrase. But most of the time Oregonians express a certain disdain at thought of California Pinot Noir.

Perhaps we just get used to our own style. I always perceive California on one side of the ripeness spectrum and Burgundy on the other with Oregon somewhere in the middle. It is an over generalization, but a starting point for understanding the differences. I always enjoy learning something about those differences so in early February I put together a blind tasting of 7 high end California Pinot Noirs from the touted 2009 vintage. Of coarse I had to put in one Oregon wine as a ringer, the 2009 Lenné Estate.

Wine Spectators number 1 wine of 2011

There were 16 people who attended the tasting, mostly wine club members and two friends from the Bay Area. What did we learn? Well I think the consensus was that these were some pretty nice wines. They are certainly opulent, extracted wines with flashy aromatics. Structurally it is hard to imagine any of them being around for longer than 6 to 8 years, but they may surprise me.  I think it would be interesting to compare 4 09 California Pinot Noirs with 4 2006 Oregon Pinot Noirs; I think the similarities wouldn’t be surprising.

The tasting also reinforced two other facts for me. First, The Wine Spectator got it right in the review of the 2009 Kosta Browne Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir. I would like to sit with a bottle and see how I feel after a couple of glasses, but it certainly showed well a blind tasting format.

The other thing I got out of the tasting was something I already knew: my vineyard produces a lot of mid palate texture. Lenné wines do sink in on the mid palate, that and the mocha aromatics are really the signature of a Lenné wine. While the Lenné didn’t have the most body or color, it certainly had the most mid palate in my opinion.

Here are the results and there were no dogs in the bunch, the difference between first and last wasn’t startling. In fact, the last place wine might be the most age-able of the bunch.

Most consumers simpley don’t like young Burgundy! Neither do I. At least not Burgundy under $100.  That sounds sacreligious coming from a Pinot Noir producer, but it is true. I suppose I should be more specific and say American-no Oregon consumers-don’t like young Burgundy. I suspect the results would be different in France. The ph of young Burgundys is low and the acidity high and most of these wines will need years in the bottle to gain suppleness. I suspect the fruit may dry up before they ever get there. I like suppleness, not flabby, low acid wines, but wines that sink into your mid palate with a velvet like richness. It is just hard to get that with Burgundy’s in the $50 to
$60 price range.

I remember richness, power and depth when I was lucky enough to taste Romanee Conti, La Tache and Richbourg multiple times some 20 years ago. I never went away with the impression that I couldn’t take a bottle home and enjoy it that night even though they were young vintages. But with the young Burgundies I taste today, I rarely get the impression that I could enjoy them anytime soon.

Each year I do a series of blind tastings in January with consumers and one of the tastings is Burgundy. Some years it has been vintage specific, some years it hasn’t but one thing has always been a constant, my wine has always come in first except once. Two years ago it came in second, to Domaine Dujac’s 2007 Morey St. Denis($125). It was still close.

So is Burgundy still the benchmark for Pinot Noir? Still yes, but you will have to pay for it.

What does the coolest vintage ever have in store for consumers? Fortunately the 2011 vintage promises more than we thought it would in late September. In fact the heat in early September and the dry weather that persisted into November saved the vintage. It could have been a disaster had we received early rain .I think the Wine Spectator gave a good brief overview of the vintage.

Morning harvest at Lenné

We were lucky with the lack of rain and the lack of  birds which consumed 10% of the Lenné crop in 2010. But what does the vintage hold for consumers? My guess is a fair amount of reasonably priced Pinot Noir with lighter, lower alcohol, food friendly wines being the norm. The 2011 vintage produced a larger than normal fruit set and in spite of its lack of heat, produced clean, desease free fruit for the most part. My initial tasting of the vintage suggests perfumed wines, with good color, mouth watering acidity(not mouth puckering) and delicate, velvety textures. I am excited to see how these wines evolve in the cellar.

But overall, the successes of the vintage will more than likely conincide with specific sites. Lenné is a warm site with stressed soils and we generally ripen early. I sometimes think we shine best in the cool vintages(05,07,08 and 2010). I don’t think his will be the norm for everyone and I imagine that because of the heavy fruit set and cool weather, many wines will be declassified into lower cost, delicate, but flavorful Pinot Noir.

Consumers should win with the vintage. And for those of you who are looking for ageable, special wines, they will be out there as well, you may just have to look a little harder. A good place to start would be to look at great sites, sites with the proper elevation(in the 300-600 foot elevation)the proper orientation(due south preferablly) and the right soil types(poor soils that drain easily and force the vine to work). Just like…well Lenné.

Harvesting Pinot Noir at Lenne on November 1st, 2011

I hope you like our new blog which we moved back on our site to make it easier to navigate. I plan on staying more connected to all of you in the coming year. Lenné is truly a remarkable site for growing Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley. In the past couple of years I have been caught up in running the vineyard and haven’t chronicled our progression as I did earlier. I would like to think I will be much better in the coming year and give you a glimpse of running a small vineyard in the heart of Yamhill County.

Steve Lutz
Vigneron

In early September of 2009 I was walking the vineyard with David O'Reilly of Owen Roe fame and a thought hit me; what if it rains? The answer was clear, turn off the lights, the party is over. Lucky for us we didn't have any early rains like 2007. In 2007 the fruit could sustain rain with smaller berries and thicker skins than in 2009. In 2009 the vines set grapes with thin skin and large berries. Hot weather in July dehydrated a percentage of berries in each cluster, compounding our worries. After an inch or two of rain you could have stood in the vineyard and imagined those berries sucking up water and popping like bubble wrap under a steam roller. Luckily the rain didn't come early in 2009.

2009 was certainly one of the more trying vintages in our brief history. It was a warm vintage with excessive ripeness because of the dehydration and warm weather. In warm vintages you have to make a choice between flavor development or higher alcohols. Grapes need to hang on the vine to attain flavor but the sugar in the grapes rise quickly in warm years. Yeasts gobble up that sugar during fermentation and convert it to alcohol. But when faced with leaving grapes on the vine to develop flavors or picking early to control the alcohol,  I always choose flavor development.

That was a difficult choice in 2009 and was made worse by the low tannin content and low natural acidity of the wines. I was worried that the wines wouldn't be balanced and the alcohol would be dominate. But then a funny thing happened, the wines seemed to integrate the alcohol with some time in the bottle. I still can't argue that the 2009 wines from Oregon are balanced, nature just didn't give us wines that had the perfect amount of fruit, acid, alcohol and tannins like the 2008 vintage. But I can say that while the alcohol's are high, the wines are full of flavor and not as hot as I expected. 

In fact most consumers prefer them the the 2008 wines as I thought they would. I suppose because is they are flat out delicious. The wines are fruit forward, soft on the palate and ready to drink now. They are some of the fastest selling wines we have ever produced at Lenné. And the biggest, most fruit forward wine we made in 2009 has also been the fastest selling clonal designate ever: 2009 Lenné Kill Hill Pinot Noir. It is big and explosive on the palate and while my customers favorite right now, I prefer both the Lenne 2009 Eleanor's 114 and the 2009 Lenne Jill's 115 Pinot Noirs. 

Whatever your preference, you have to keep in mind that the 2009 wines will be short lived. If you have them in your cellar 5 years from now you have made a mistake though they should get aromatically more complex with 2-3 years of bottle ageing. Also, with summer upon us, it is important to serve the wines at a cool room temperature as the alcohol will stick out if they become warm. Just remember to drink the 09's and let  your 08's sit in the cellar at least  until late fall, but longer if you have patience. The 2008 wines are in the toddler phase, starting to show some personality, but very undeveloped still. 

Sometimes you find culinary gems in the most unusual place. I had that experience recently at two very different restaurants. When you live inside Portland proper, you never think about going to the suburbs to eat, you just don't. There are just too many great restaurants close to home that making a jaunt across the river for dinner is a special circumstance and in our case, two dear friends live in the Portland suburb called Bethany. In this typical suburban landscape  sits a small suburban commercial center called Bethany village with a multitude of commercial business sitting at the base of a several swaths of condo complexes.

And in downtown Suburbia who would have thunk it, a fantastic Friday night wine tasting at an ever evolving eatery called The Bethany Table.

The Bethany Table started off as a prepare your own meal franchise and has evolved beyond that more to a more conventional restaurant. What puzzles me is why their Friday night tastings don't have a waiting list a mile long. It was one of the best $30 dollars I ever spent. Owners David Bowles and Janet O`Conner call it a wine tasting, but it is more like a four course sampling menu paired with wines. The first course was a ceaser salad paired with a Macon. Following that was a salmon bisque with a Mark Ryan Chardonnay. The next course was a Barbera D'Alba paired with Janet's beautiful savory tart(Janet used to own The Savory Tart in the Hollowood district in Portland). The meal, oh tasting, finished with a small piece of prime rib paired with two great Cabernets from Washington. Could you spend a better $30 in this recession if you are a food and wine lover?

My other recent culinary experience also opened my eyes. You would think that the Oregon wine country would have a plethora of great places to eat but the food scene is just starting to evolve in Oregon wine country.  A number of good if not great places exist, but one great restaurant can boast the best food in Oregon wine country for my dollar: The Painted Lady.

The Painted Lady is most certainly a fine dining experience. If you are in the mood fore something casual and quick this isn't the place to go. This is a place to languish over a meal, to savor the Northwest dining experience that is fresh, delicious and beautifully presented.  If you are here on a wine country experience, I wouldn't miss this.

And two new places have rave review. The first is Jory, the restuarant at the new 80 room wine country hotel called the Allison Inn and Spa. I haven't eaten there yet, but I have heard good reveiws and I have to love any hotel that plants a huge garden for fresh produce.

The second new restuarant is Farm to Fork at the Inn at Red Hills in Dundee

. I have heard nothing but good things about this new eatery including rave reveiws from my business partner and chec, Gabriel Caliendo. Gabe knows food and said he had an amazing food experience there which puts it high on my to do list.

Wine country in the Northern Willamette Valley isn't the new Napa and we are happy about that, but a little world class food sprinkled in doesn't hurt.

Summer is finally upon us at Lenné. By the time mid July hits much of our work in the vineyard is done. With less time on the tractor, I find myself enjoying some warm afternoons on the deck enjoying the view and reflecting on how far we have come from that April day in 2000 when we first stepped foot an this steep pasture in the heart of Yamhill County.

Along the way a few interesting , sometime disastrous things have happened. But last week I had to reflect on something that has nothing to do with what happens in the vineyard, nothing to do with the weather or wine quality. I had to reflect on the people you meet along the way.

About a year ago several couples visited the winery and became big fans. One of the couples, Mike and Anne, have visited since and on one of their visits we started talking about Burgundy. On their most recent visit they surprised me with some Burgundies from their cellar. Not just any Burgundies, but Premier Crus from the mid to late 90's and one Gran Cru from 92. I was flabbergasted. I buy several Premier Crus from each vintage but only go back to 98 in my cellar. While I will wait for fall to dip into any of these wines, I was really gob smacked as my English relatives would say, that Mike and Anne would open up their cellar to me and truck these beautiful wines from the east coast.

Later that day a small foreign car made its way up the hill with an older and younger man. For me it was an opportunity missed as I was rushing to pick up a tractor part before the Oregon Vineyard Supply store closed. I have long suspected that there are two or three people on the planet who read my blog and low and behold, the younger man was one of them. He said he followed my "living the dream" blog and that is why they came. I was speechless twice in one day. Unfortunately it was an opportunity missed for me as I was in a hurry and couldn't spend more time with them. It turns out that the older man was his father and he took some time to chat with me before I left. He was from Belgium and had been in the ag business and was the type of person whose life experience showed on his face. He was more than interesting and part of me just wanted to sit down and have a glass of wine and listen, learn about his life.

Driving away that night I thought about Mike and Anne and the Belgian and his son and all the people I who have sought out our special little place. You really do meet the nicest people in this business and it made me think that I am really lucky to be living this dream.

Well, with another late spring and the admonishment from the two or three people who read my blog for being absent so long, I decided it was time I say something about the 2007 vintage in these uncertain times.

There probably will never be a bad vintage every again in Oregon or anywhere else. That's if you believe a vintner and from my perspective you should always believe what we have to say. I have read some crazy things about the 2007 vintage in the Northern Willamette Valley, but suffice to say it is a vintage like 2007 that separates the great sites from the rest. Great sites produced some remarkable wine, worthy of seeking out, but for every great site, there were probably 20 that produced marginal wine.

It's not that the 2007 vintage produced lighter, more delicate wines, but that there is a hollowness about many of them the make them ultimately not as satisfying. Does that mean they aren't enjoyable? Far from it, their delicacy makes them an appealing when juxtaposed to their 2006 high alcohol counterparts. And, if you believe a recent New York Times article detailing the California vintners who are extoling the virtues of delicate Pinot Noir, we should get our pencils sharpened to count all the money from the orders bound to be flooding in. That article might be a discussion for another blog, picking Pinot Noir early to capture it's delicacy……lol.  While we are at it we can hang 4 tons per acre(well my stressed vineyard would never set that much), that ought to produce some delicacy.

But I digress. What I am really hear to talk about is the 2007 vintage. Jay Miller from The Wine Advocate summed up the vintage pretty well: "2007 appears to be a superb vintage for Pinot Noir. It
will appeal to fans who like the intellectual appeal of Burgundy as
well as those who come down more on the hedonist's side of the coin." That counts about 90% of consumers out. If you lined up 10 wine consumers, not Pinot Geeks, but the type of people who know Pinot and enjoy it and buy it, 8 out of 10 of them would pick the 06 vintage in a blind tasting over the 07. It's just the way it is.

Myself, I would favor the 07 Oregon wines that came from great sites, not necessarily the ones that came from lessor sites. Pinot tends to go from cherry, to black cherry, to really black cherry,to borderline plum and prune in the warmer vintages. There is no denying the opulence of the 2006 vintage, but the bright fruit, inherent spicy qualities of the 07 vintage, work for me better than the flavors of the 06.

I have told people unabashadly that I will be shocked if anyone makes a better 07 in Oregon than my 2007 Lenné Estate. My site is steep and windy which is important to prevent absorbtion from the showers that plagued us all through harvest. It was an interesting vintage to look back on and I am sure it would have been a disaster 10 years earlier when crop levels and canopy management were much more in line with the lower prices of the wines then. But there is a reason we drop fruit, spend a ton of money in managing our canapy and our vineyard in general: vintages like 2007. 

I was also fortunate to have a good mentor in 2007, David O'Reilly of Owen Roe. David buys grapes from me which go into his Kilmore Pinot Noir. He and his crew have had a big hand in making my wine what it is. On the 24th of September, we samples and walked the vineyard tasting grapes. We were at 23.5-24 degrees brix with good pH numbers. We knew the rain was coming and I was nervous, may have even jumped the gun as I hadn't been through a wet vintage on my site. "After we finished walking the vineyard all David said was, "go ahead and pick your grapes if you want to, but leave my portion hang." Enough said, I did it and one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Some good wines will be made from 2007, maybe even some great ones, but no bad wines. You can believe that, you read it on the internet.