Barrel, to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, Listening to It, You Are. Okay, yeah. I'm Greg, I do communications at Binny's. I'm Lexi, I'm on the internet. I'm Chris, I am not, definitively not on the internet in any way, shape or form. This is a Chris episode. Yeah, and it will not be downloaded to the internet. Uploaded to the internet. Well, you can't download it from the internet. Right. Because it won't be uploaded. Here's how much I don't know about the internet. I don't know how to down or up. Okay. For everything you don't know about ups and downs, you do know about today's topic, which is? Today's topic, 2022 Willamette Valley, Pininure. Oh, neat. Yeah. The Willamette Valley, very famous AVA in Oregon. It's been an AVA since 1983. 2022 was a particularly good year, and they've had some hard times lately, because 2020, they had wildfires, and it pretty much messed everything up. And 2022 was looking pretty rough, because they had late frost, really screwed up fruit set. Strangely, things turned out magnificently. Seriously? Yeah. They had a great rest of the vintage. There were some bumps along the way, but the fruit quality turned out to be excellent, and yields were not as low as they thought. They thought they were going to be disastrous because of this frost. We're getting all kinds of wines in. There are already a ton on the shelf, and the quality is pretty universally excellent. I'm excited to dive in. Right. Chris, I can't help but notice that you didn't bring any fats or carbohydrates. That is true. There are no fats or carbohydrates, although these wines are magnificent with food, and they can age. One of their hallmarks are pretty high acidity because this is a cool maritime climate. Willamette Valley is only about 50 miles from the ocean, and there is a large wind gap called the Vanduzer Corridor that feeds cold ocean air in. But there are some appellations, some sub-AVAs that are more protected and some that are more exposed, so you get different styles. We're going to try wines from different parts of the Willamette Valley, and why not just start? Cool. So Chris, where do you want to start with this tour of 2022 Willamette? Real quick, for our friends that maybe don't know where that is. The Willamette Valley. Yes. Someone's going to say, where is that? Then they're going to have to Google it, or they can listen to our podcast and we tell them. This is a really great point. So I think I mentioned that it's just 50 miles inland from the Oregon Coast, the beautiful rocky Oregon Coast, North Oregon Coast. It is southwest of Portland. I mean, you can drive half an hour and be in the Willamette Valley. It extends down to Salem, if you know where that is. How close to Washington State? Very. So is it like the same valley or the same region? So there is crossover. So there's a famous Sira producer called Caius that has an appellation that would sound like it's in Washington, but it's actually over the border in Oregon. Soil types are affected by what happened up north in Washington, the Columbia River Gorge. Okay. This is kind of an aside, but there is a series of floods called the Missoula floods or various other things due to the last ice age. Ice dams broke and brought a lot of silty soil down into the Willamette Valley. Other soil types. Wine always devolves into geography, geology, geology. Geology, rocks, minerals. Well, when we're on the subject, I mean, you basically have the main soil types here are volcanic. So we're looking at the the coast range. So 50 miles inland, there's a mountain range in between, a coast range of mountains that protects the valley from the super cold weather from the coast. But as I said, there's the Van Duzer Corridor, which allows cold air to come in and affects the southern valley more. That sounds a lot like Napa. Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of similarities. It is oriented differently. Napa has a bay to the south. The valley runs north-south, so it comes right up the valley. This flows in from the west and through this corridor, and the valley does basically run north-south as well. But like the same concept, like hot sun exposure tempered by cool air being sucked in from the coast. Right, exactly. So this is a cool climate, but it has more rain than most, although the mountain does provide some rain shadow. So if you're familiar with this, the weather kind of gets blocked by mountains and cuts down on rain. Other places have this too. Alsace famously has the Vosges Mountains, which create a huge rain shadow over the area. Even though that exists, there is rain throughout the season, maybe more than they would like some years, but it is mitigated by that. So we're talking about a valley that runs from south of Portland down to Salem, mostly shrouded by mountains on the... The Cascades are on the other side, I think. Another mountain range on the other side. What you get is a bunch of sub-AVAs, right? And this is kind of what we're looking at today. So in the north, you get the Chehalem Mountains and Yamhill Carlton and Ribbon Ridge, which are all kind of tucked into the mountain. So southwest of Portland, you get Chehalem Hills, a little sub-region within the Chehalem Hills called Ribbon Ridge. You have Yamhill Carlton, you have the Dundee Hills, which is kind of the heart of Oregon, Pino, where kind of the epicenter is where it was kind of launched in the 60s as a wine growing region. And then down further south, you have McMinnville and Eola Amity Hills, which are the most affected by this van Duser corridor. So you have really cool climate wines to the south, warmer climate wines tucked in up north. But then you also get high elevation in places like Ribbon Ridge, Chehalem Hills. So that also makes it a little cooler. So there's a variety of terroir. And if anybody can imagine the map of Oregon in their head, this may have helped or it may have confused them. We're gonna start with a broad Willamette Valley wine. So this means that the grapes can come from throughout Willamette, not from a specific sub AVA. This is all made with purchased grapes, I do believe. I know that Lexi is down with OPP. Excited about OPP? Oh yeah, I love this one. Yeah. Naughty by Nature. Anybody remember that? Yes. Hit hip hop song. Stop it from the early 90s. Stop referencing it. Yo, you're down with OPP? Yes, you know me, OPP. Other People's Pino. Yes. Pino. Yes. 2022 Oregon. Pronounce that pronouner, please. Willamette Valley. Yeah. This is a project called Maison Noir, started by a guy named, he's a sommelier, he made his bones in Texas and his name is Andre Houston Mack. This is like a mixed wine lifestyle brand. He does shirts and stuff and it has this hip-hop aesthetic going on. It's pretty interesting project. We have other wines by them. They all have this bold white, black on white look. It reminds me a little bit of the Charles Smith wines. I was thinking that. Yeah. But like horseshoes and hand grenades, have you seen that one? That's them. Oh, I thought that was Charles Smith. Yeah, see. So anyway, Maison Noir, which obviously is the black house, which he's leaning into his heritage here, which is cool. He became a superstar, some work for Thomas Keller at both the French Laundry. Yeah. One of the most famous restaurants in the country in Napa Valley, and also he moved to New York and worked for Per Se, which is Thomas Keller's New York operation, both just super high-end places. Yeah, he decided to start his own brand, started making small amounts, selling them through restaurants. He was working at New York, and here is 2022 OPP. Kind of flinty. There's an intensity of fruit underneath this smokiness. Yeah, it's earthy. There's a little bit of that smoky, dried forest flora aroma. Yeah. Red fruit. Red fruit, more on the raspberry side, but some candy cherry too. And then there's like a citric acidity hits the sides of your palate as you put it in the mouth. I was gonna say, there's like a peanut or typically, but there's a nice dryness to it, and the acidity kind of goes back and forth. It makes you just want to keep drinking it. Yeah, it's super mouth-watering acidity. Juicy as all get out. Yeah. It is. Really nice. I mean, this is only 22.99 good entry-level Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. Great with food. We did this before lunch again. Yeah. And this acidity just makes me want cheese. Yeah. And almonds. Pizza. This with pizza? Lovely. Sure. Yeah. It'd also be spectacular with mushroom dishes, in my opinion, salmon. Salmon. Pretty good. Mushroom, salmon, pizza. Anyway, pretty cool little project this guy put together. You can go on the web and buy his t-shirts and stuff too, which is neat. Again, I don't know where the grapes are sourced from. Certainly purchased. I mean, that's maybe kind of what he's saying about other people's Pinot. One thing that we might want to delve into here is when we get to the more specific things is the use of different clones. Pinot Noir is probably the most talked about grape variety when it comes to different kinds or strains of Pinot Noir. They're all genetically Pinot Noir, of course. But Chardonnay too, right? Chardonnay has a lot of clones too. What they have in common is there are famous clones that were developed in the 50s, 60s in Dijon, Burgundy, to isolate the genetics and clean up any viruses. The big problem in wine is vines with heavy virus loads. Nurseries try to spend a lot of time cleaning up genetics, not the genetics per se, but a genetic strain by getting rid of viruses and making them clean. Sometimes- Let's come back around to the vine eugenics at the end of the- It is vine eugenics, and it's even more than eugenics. There's a lot to say about the epigenetic profile of Pinot Noir too. You cannot inherit acquired traits is one of the main tenets of a Darwin-based evolution. Historically, people have said that Pinot Noir is this ancient grape variety. It has unstable genetics and is prone to mutation, which is not necessarily true. It's more prone to epigenetic change based on where it's planted. It's very sensitive to terroir. Even on the same plant, you might get a branch of white grapes, Pinot Blanc growing on Pinot Noir. Whoa. Okay. To bring things back around in human language, they made a bunch of different clones of Pinot Noir, and that's what they grow in America and everywhere else in the world. You might have the same Dijon clone, but it's going to behave differently, more than just the difference in the land, but the way that the grape reacts to the land is going to be different. Precisely. That is a very good way to put it. Neat. Yeah. Just to be clear, a clone is a cutting, so it has the same genetics as its parent plant, that is then propagated over and over. So along the line, you have the same exact genetics, and if you're doing this in a lab, you're using heat treatment to kill viruses. You clean it all up, and you have this pure genetic heritage. Speaking of eugenics, I know it's creepy. Did you know this about grapes? It's true for a lot of agriculture, including agave, except that's just all one species. The vines in a vineyard are the same genetic clone of the same individual crop that they graft onto a different species' root stock. It's just a big propagation station. Yeah. Also, some people choose to plant a mixture of clones, and there are heritage varietals that haven't necessarily been cloned per se, which is this propagation over time of the same genetics being cut. But they do something called a macelle selection, where this is a very historic and important use of vineyard, particularly with Pinot Noir, but with almost anything, where a vigneron will choose his best plants, his favorite plants that show him the best characteristics, take cuttings and propagate those in his vineyard informally. So he's just selecting his favorite. Well, that's just how you get a Dalmatian. Yeah. This is more like breeding than cloning. Right? So in any given vineyard, he might like 100 vines out of 700. And so he's not just cloning, picking one, he's picking things for different characteristics. Right. And that's the thing about clones too, is they all display different characteristics and express differently depending where they're planted. So it's very complicated. When you're doing this genetic stuff with gnats and peas, generations happen in weeks and you can do a lot. When you're doing this with vines, it's a generation a year at most, and sometimes you have to wait for seven years before the grapes mean anything. So this takes forever. This is a multi-generation project. Yeah. And rather than gnats, I think you mean fruit flies. That's what I mean, fruit flies. Drosophila melanogaster. Hyland Estate, Pinot Noir, this is the Petit Estate. Single vineyard. So this is the Hyland Vineyard. This is a very, very old vineyard site planted in 1971. Neat. This is about as early as plantings get in the valley. You know, they planted Pomard clone. Oh. Yeah. So that's straight from the town of Pomard. In Burgundy. In Burgundy. Some people say even from Chateau Pomard, a very famous place. Neat. That's planted all over the place. They also planted Wadenswil, which came over in the 50s from Switzerland. That I've never heard of. Yeah. It's very, very popular in Oregon. It gives you high-toned aromatics, rose petal, bright red fruit. Pomard gives you dark, earthy, spicy. So you can see right away with these two different clones, one from Burgundy, one from Switzerland, that you get completely different aromatic profiles and flavor profiles. And why you might want to blend them together or bottle them separately. And then beyond that, you have the Quarry Clone, another clone that a guy propagated. He was working in Oregon with Dick Erath and some of the really early guys. So Erath Winery, one of the earlier Nudsen Erath is what it was called back in the day. And Irie, David Lett there, he's like the epicenter, the origin in their mid-60s planting vines in the Willamette Valley. So they planted these clones from our heritage selections. Now you see more and more of the Dijon clones, which are numbered. And they didn't get into the states until the late 80s. So this is as historic as it gets for Oregon. It is with a caveat. So this comes out of this really, really old vineyard, but they have an old vine bottling, which is not that much more expensive, that uses all of those. This is the Petita state, which uses the young vines in the same vineyard. Oh, thanks Chris, bring us background and none of this matters. I'm giving you background on the winery. Well, it smells great anyway. There's a doodle of a pretty old vine right on the label. Is that a young one or an old one? Well, it looks to be middle-aged. Okay. You know. That's the Greg of Oregon Pinot Noir vines right there. I think this bottling leans toward Dijon Clone 115, which was one of the earlier Dijon clones produced. At the risk of another tangent, I don't think I'm familiar with this AVA. This is where we get into AVA's. This is McMinnville. McMinnville is south and it is along the northern border of the Van Duzer Corridor. This is one of the places that gets a lot of cooling from this ocean influx. It's right at the edge of where the cool air comes in. Yeah, it is on the edge of the cool air. That is correct. It smells great. Yeah, let's check this out. This is so fruity. I want to drink this in the dead of winter, a nice blanket after a really busy day of shopping. From holidays, you know. Is this holiday shopping or the dead of January retail therapy shopping? Honestly, both. I think you'll notice pretty bright acidity again. Yeah. To me, I get a lot of brown spice. There's a lot of cinnamon on the palate and a lot of red fruit. Is there like a black tea quality? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And it gives it an edge. I agree. There is a black tea quality. And other spices too. I mean, I almost get a hint of cardamom. When you say black tea, I almost started wandering toward traditional chai with spices involved. The structure and bitterness of cranberry. Yeah. These are pretty classic descriptors for Willamette Valley, Pinot, cranberry, raspberry, cherry, plum, depending. Right. But it's not that ripe. Yeah. It's fruity, but it's like youthful, vibrant, edgy fruit. Yeah. It is youthful, vibrant, and edgy. And you can see that that marine influence, I think. What else to say about this one? Did you say how much it was? This is $21.99. Oh, seriously? Yeah, $21.99. It seems really serious for that price. It is pretty serious for that price. And like I said, one of the foundational wineries of the Willamette Valley. The soils here are mostly volcanic. That's the Jory series, if that means anything to anybody, any geologists out there. Oh, I think I never said this, Greg, but one of the other important soils here is... Is it less? Yes. I knew he was going to tease me about less. Less is more. Less is windblown silt that collects in hills. That only appears in Western Iowa and Eastern Nebraska. In my hometown and somewhere in China and apparently everywhere else, but they also told us that black squirrels were unique to my hometown, and I saw one in Skokie yesterday. Right. Where are we going next? Moving on, we're going to go to the Dundee Hills. So this is what I would call the ground zero of a modern Oregon Pinot Noir. More of a household name. Yeah. So there are close to 50 wineries in this area. Some of the names you probably are familiar with, like you name it, Argyle, Drouin, Domaine Serene. Some of the really big guys that you'll see on our shelves. The color is a lot lighter in this one. It is indeed. You have to respect their dedication to sticking with an outdated label design. Yeah. So we're hitting some really important producers here and really historic vineyard sites. So the Maresh Vineyard again dates back way, way back to late 60s, early 70s. The Maresh family bought a ranch out there not intending to grow grapes long, long ago. And of course, they were influenced by who? The same people, Dick Arath, David Lett. They like plant, peat, and oir, and they did. There are un-grafted old vines here too, in the Maresh Vineyard. Again, we have the same suspects, Wadden, Swill, Pomard, et cetera. So it wasn't until one of the Maresh's daughters, I think, I think her name is Martha, maybe. Martha Maresh married an Archerberry, and they had a kid, and then the original Archerberry, who was UC Davis trained, one of the few in the valley at the time, very influential wine maker. His kid took over and started Archerberry Maresh. And this has been going on since, I believe, 2005. They bought this ranch in 1959, so they were really, really early on, and they started planting in 1970, just like a lot of these really early wines. These wines, I think, are always phenomenal, really focused, really bright, really intense. Archerberry Maresh. The boy had a cherry candy, right? I tried to remember this before. I think it was a bubble gum. There was a red ball that was like this big around, and it had gum in the middle of it, but it tasted like the juiciest cherry candy you've ever had. You know what I'm talking about? I was confusing it with those strawberries before. Yeah, yeah. I remember when you brought that up before. The cherry thing. I think it had gum in it. Gum makes all the difference, yeah. I know what you're talking about. And it smells like one of those. Yeah. It smells. It's definitely juicy. Yeah. Super juicy, super bright, super food friendly. Holy cow. There's a little bit of tannin, but it's really restrained and underneath all of this other bright fruit. A big jump from the last two, I think. In terms of liveliness and expressive fruit. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And you're right. The texture is quite silky. Yeah. This is an excellent wine. And if you can believe it, it's only $31.99. I mean, this is world class quality Pinot Noir. It's also subtle. Like there's a ton of fruit, but other than that, it doesn't really grab you. And is this what people are looking for in burgundy? What's going to happen to this over time? It will age well. Surprisingly, maybe not so surprisingly, Willamette Valley wines do age well because of their structure. That bright acidity, despite the fact that the tannins are very, very fine and super silky already, they're definitely present. Yeah. And there is a core of fruit here that will allow this to become more spicy, gamey, maybe a little chocolatey over the long term. This one makes me go like this with my beard, pinch my beard contemplatively in my hand. Yeah, it's a thinker. And fun at the same time. I totally agree. So, if you recall, Dundee Hills are north from McMinnville, where we were last, kind of tucked in to little southeast corner of Yamhill, Carlton and Chehalem Hills. Higher up? No, relatively lower than, say, Chehalem Hills. Some are pretty low elevation, but there's some elevation here. Yeah, I mean, it does have Hills in the name. Okay. All right. This is a very historic winery. Well, maybe not a historic winery since this version only started in 2005, but its pedigree goes way, way back. I mean, again, the founders of the valley basically helped plant this vineyard. So taking a moment to appreciate that Chris started this episode by saying that all of the wine makers were pooping their pants at the beginning of the growing season with the frost that killed all the flowers. And then this is the product that they got at the back end. They must be like, whoo. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Oregon can be a bit of a roller coaster ride. I mean, they can have really rainy vintages, cool rainy vintages. They can have, because it is inland a little bit, they can have heat spikes that are unwelcome. And yeah, frost around the world, just unpredictability of weather has become the bane of every vineyard manager on the planet. You're seeing late frosts that nobody expects. And then huge heat spikes. It's completely, not completely unmanageable, but it's getting to the point where people are having a hard time managing. But they pulled this one out like true pros. Cool. Where are we going next? We are going, you mentioned these guys a little earlier. This is Christam. Oh, the answer key was sitting on the table in front of me, and I didn't peek. You didn't peek. So this is the Mt. Jefferson Cuvee. It's from the Eola Amity Hills. This used to, I believe, come from a single vineyard site on the property called Jesse's Vineyard. They have a bunch of vineyards that are named for people in the family, Eileen, Jesse. How cute. Yeah. Why can't I find a Pinot like that? Yeah. I knew it was coming at some point. Wow. I know that song, guys. Round of applause for you to know the song referenced. Yes. So this was founded by a guy named Paul Geary, or Gary. He also has a vineyard name for him. He's now deceased. His son runs things now. This is now, I think, mostly Jesse's Vineyard, like 75 percent of state fruit, and then also purchased fruit from around Eola Amity, which, again, as you recall, this is one of the cooler climates. This is way down. It gets a lot of Enduser influence just north of Salem. The nose here, it has all of the cherry that we had before, but it has this pomegranate twist. It's like tutti frutti Hawaiian punch kind of twist at the beginning. Yeah. So this was founded in 1992, and Mr. Gary named the place after his two sons, Chris and Tom, if you can believe that. And now Tom is the guy. Seriously, it's named Chris Tom. I've been saying Christom, like it's this like sacred thing. Everybody does. I think that's OK to kind of slur it together, but Chris Tom is a little clunky. It's good that he had like mono-syllabic kids, you know, like Larry and Jason Bruce. Right. Help me out. Give me something funnier. Nebuchadnezzar and Salamander. Yeah, Salamander and Nebuchadnezzar, that would have worked out well. That would be a little unwieldy. I can't think of any guy's names right now. Well, those are guys' names. How many? I mean, Christam sounds a lot better than Daniel Charles. Yes. Charles is still really one syllable. Danchuk? Tom Chris. Tom Chris. Tom Chris, yes. I would definitely buy Danchuk for sure. Danchuk. It's a little Danchuk. Yeah. It's very manly. I know. It's toxic masculinity. It's something you warm up in the microwave and it feeds a hunger man. I had me two Danchuks last night. Two Danchuks. Comes in a can, you could eat it with a fork. Gross. It's a hamburger helper. This is good riffing. Anyway, this smells great. Yeah. So again, Van Dusen recorder influences heavy here. This place opened in 1992 if I didn't say that. They do some whole cluster here, so that tends to provide that fruitiness that you're talking about. Oh. That would include stems which can give you some spicier tannins. Yeah. So there's a little bit of that going on. I don't know why that didn't jump out at me immediately. Yeah. Native yeast. Carbonic maceration or not? Yeah. I mean, it is akin to semi-carbonic maceration, yes. Semi-carbonic maceration, right? Yeah, of course. Lexi? Because the grapes are whole, the fermentation starts within the grape as an enzymatic change until they burst. The skin itself is really bitter, but it's not imparting flavors because the fermentation is happening inside. It hasn't broken out to start to absorb the bitterness of the skin. So it gets really fruity really fast. I think we talked about this a month or two ago. Probably. About this process. We love talking about this process. Carbonic mastery. It's the greatest process. And whole cluster fermentation. Yeah. I think that's what we talked about. Well, we did try Willamette Valley Ventner's Whole Cluster Pino, I think, a few episodes ago. It has the process right in the name. It does. They could do 100 percent. The Chris Tom is $39.99. All right. Yeah. Eola Amity Hills Expression. But don't neglect the single vineyards. They're all estate vineyards. Like I said, they're all named for different people. We have many of them on the shelf right now, and they're special wine. Another interesting thing about this is when they started, the owner hired away Steve Dorner, who was one of the original winemakers at Calera, which is a super important Pino producer in California. Their first vintage was 1978. He worked at Domaine Dujac, one of the truly great estates in Burgundy. Calera allegedly, so here's a whole other side to Pino Noir selections. Calera allegedly snatched some DRC, Budwood, and maybe some other things. Pizzoni in Santa Lucia Highlands also is said to have nicked some cuttings from DRC. Domaine de la Romanée Conti. They're stealing the grapes vines from the most expensive and highly regarded vineyards in the world. Yeah, exactly. This is like some international spy thriller stuff in there. Okay. These are called suitcase cuttings because people just pack them in their suitcase and smuggle them in. Smuggle them in, the keystert of into America. The problem is they don't go through quarantine. It's an interesting proposition. Yeah, that is how you get like a blight that kills all of the vines in the country. Absolutely correct. There's a reason that there are nurseries and places where grapevines come into the country and stay isolated and are cleaned up before they are released to wineries. But a lot of people skirt that process by doing these suitcase. They also have a lot of California heritage clones planted including Clara, Mount Eden, which was propagated in the 50s by Martin Ray, Swan Clone, Joseph Swan we have on the shelf. He's an old school Russian River Valley producer. All of these guys have not clones but selections named for their famous vineyards and people use them. Inside of Chris's brain, there is a wall of little scraps and yarn connecting them. And he's just staring at it right now. I'm furrowing his brow and solving things. I'm the serial killer hunter of... I have that in my brain but it's 90s bands. Really. Like everything goes through Mike Watt. Now, we're going to go to Patricia Green Sellers, yeah, 2022. Why the O? We'd like to give a special shout out to our dear Wynn Consultant, Ben, in Lincoln Park. So Ben favorite? Dear Ben in Lincoln Park. Ben knows what's up. This is for you, this is La Belle Promenade Vineyard. This is located in the Chehalem Hills. They are sourcing this, they're another winery that does a ton of different single vineyard bottlings. This is very common for pinot producers because they believe that terroir is so important that they bottle endless different iterations of pinot noir from different vineyard sites. This is the La Belle Promenade Vineyard. So this is Chehalem Hills representation. This is highest elevations in the valley. Single vineyard nonetheless. Yeah, and it's nestled up against the mountains and just southwest of Portland. This is the first appellation you'd encounter if you're traveling from Portland. Hot damn. Yeah. This is good. So Patricia Greene themselves are located in the Ribbon Ridge area. This vineyard site is just stones throw east of Bean in Ribbon Ridge, which is a tiny little area that was carved out of Chehalem Hills. It contains some very famous wineries, not just Patricia Greene, but also Beau Frere, which people may know, very popular, high-end, popular, once owned partly by Robert Parker. That is forever burned into my brain. Every time I see that cartoony Crayola label, I'm like, Parker had that. Yeah. So Beau Frere means brother-in-law. So it was his brother-in-law's place. It's an incestuous industry. It is. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Trissatum, which we carry sometimes, is right here too. I can't do this right now. I got to talk about this wine. Yeah, go for it. This is fabulous. The fruit is richer. The spice box is more complex. There's almost cinnamon, like a spiciness to it. And the mouthfeel itself, there's like an extra dimension of plushness here. And it's probably from tannin, but it's a thicker, more visceral, more powerful, but it's still an elegant expression of Pinot Noir. I'm dancing in my pants. This is delicious. Mr. Versh, you have pretty much nailed the classic profile with Chehalam Hills. Cinnamon, dark, rich fruit, tannic structure. So here we go. This is where things get big, beefy. He's making the hand gesture where he's like grabbing a baseball, or like a mozzarella wad. Yeah. That's the hand gesture. I've seen wine salespeople do this forever where they really get into something. Squeezing the cream out of a burrata. Yeah. Exactly. It's like, grrr. So anyway, that was an illustration for the listener at home. Blood from a stone. All right. So you're making that hand gesture as you're like dark fruit. Yeah. So structured. Yeah. Big, dark-fruited, spicy cinnamon in particular. I think you nailed it completely. It's delicious. It is. And now you're going to be like, this is $89.99. No. See, I didn't go into the stratosphere here. This is $46.99. That's reasonable. For this quality, hell yeah. I'm not like saying this is an overwhelming value, but this is a really good bottle of wine for under $50. Yeah, you are correct. And you know, all of these go on sale occasionally. True. I think your cab drinker looking for something a little different might like this. It doesn't have the same structure, but it has like the guts and the power. Yeah. I mean, if you're trying to get someone to transition for, like so many people are so cab centric, you just can't get them off it. That's all they ever drink. But if you're trying to move someone toward Pinot and shove them toward the elegance of Pinot Noir, this would be a good gateway. You're right. Because it is bolder than many. What do you think? You're like, it's fine. No, it's good. It's good. Too much tannin for you? It's a little tannin heavy. Yeah. I do like the nice mouthfeel of it, though. It is a little different, especially, I think the last one or the one before that was quite light. It's okay to like lighter, fresher, more expressive wines, instead of the doldrums that this is like, rawr. Yeah. I think it also makes a difference, the temperature in the room. Oh, yeah. As it slowly starts to get warmer in the podcast room, we have slowly gotten darker and bolder and stronger. Yeah, good point. This is one of these lines that has a mixture of clones and stuff. It's largely pomade clone from one block of this vineyard, which is owned by the Flonure Estate. This is a common practice to buy fruit from somebody else. It's one of the highest elevation vineyards around. Pomade from one block and then a mixture of seven different clones in another block. We've got complexity going on here too as far as genetics go. We're talking about clones, we're talking about terroir. Earlier mentioned the Ken Wright portfolio when having 10 or 12 different vineyard expressions from the same producer, that would be a horizontal. Have you ever done the six different wineries that buy the single vineyard expressions and then tried the wineries take on the same grapes? Yeah, absolutely. One great place to do that is the Shea Vineyard. Shea is a place that probably at least a dozen. Shea spelled just like the butter. Yeah, right. That's true. S-H-E-A. At least a dozen producers buy fruit there, plus there's the Shea Winery itself. So that's an easy one to do and Ken Wright has one of those too. Cool. That would be a top recommendation for easily finding several iterations. But you can do it with a lot of different vineyard sites. We should totally do that sometime on the podcast. Because there's all these different, like, I don't know, ingredients in the spice cabinet that wineries can use to impact. And like even, Barb would say this, even like non-interventionalist wine making is a stylistic decision. And I mean, we talk about terroir, where the grapes were grown and talk about clones. But that's just, that's the fruit coming from that spot. But then there's still like the yeast that you use, and there's the barrel treatment that you use, and the extensive aging in the time and bottle, and all of these different factors. And I think it would be really cool to like get into the fine grain minutia of how all of these different people with their own takes take the same or what is essentially the same composition and then their own recipe. What am I talking about? Iron Chef. I want to see Iron Chef. Yeah. No. I mean, what you're saying is 100% valid. In fact, this wine, unlike some of the others, has no whole cluster fermentation at all. Oh yeah. It's 100% destemmed. So that's a choice. So it's probably getting like more robust just based on the wine making choice. Exactly. So more extraction of tannin. Everything can matter. Using native yeast, pitching a yeast. Yeah. Exactly. How long does it stay in barrel? What percentage of your barrel is new as opposed to used? Right. All of the things you stated are the nuances that the winemaker will bring. So yeah, everybody talks about the wine being made in the vineyard and the winemaker being a shepherd, but you're absolutely correct. Even non-interventionist winemaking is a winemaking choice. You can be as hands-off as you want to be, or as active as you want to be, and you can totally change the expression. Cool. So this was an example of five different wines from very broad to very specific and across the Willamette Valley. Does Alicia know that we're doing this? Cause she would want in on this tasting. Yes, she would want in on this tasting. Right? Yes. This is like one of her favorite categories. This is the kind of tasting that wine professionals get super thrilled about. And thank you for, how do you like Pinot Noir? She didn't learn a damn thing. No, I did. I think I learned maybe too much. I think that my little TikTok brain is like short-circuiting a little bit, trying to shovel information. I learned today that I think I like lighter, juicier Pinot Noirs. That's how it starts, though. Yeah, we'll get there. That's how it starts, yeah. I also learned a lot more about the Willamette Valley that I did not know. I knew it was probably not even close to the size that it is. Does the Van Duzer Gap, is there a body of water there? Is it a tributary to the Columbia River? No. Oh. So the corridor leads to the Pacific Ocean. It leads right to the ocean. Yeah. The coastal range run north-south. Yeah. This is an east-west gap that goes to the Pacific. This goes whoop. Yep. Neat. Yep. The Columbia runs north of here. There is the Willamette River though that runs through the valley. I think I also learned that I've always loved Portland and the Pacific Northwest. Yeah. I should have gone wine tasting there. You definitely should. Yeah, you should. There's always so much more to learn and discover. Chris, thanks for walking us through these 2022 Pinot Noirs coming from Oregon, coming from the Willamette Valley. There's more coming in all the time. This is the current release. Word. Yep. If you're scared of Pinot Noirs, do not be. Do not be. They're approachable. There's nothing frightening about Pinot Noir. It's just hyper sophisticated and beyond your grasp. Yeah. See, that's how... But a lot of times, that's how it feels. A lot of people like that. Chris is jokingly impersonating a wine person. You know? It's not. It's not at all. It's a beautiful wine. It's beautiful for food. It's aromatic. It's so delightful. If you like learning from this podcast about wines as much as I like learning from this podcast about wines, leave us a review on Apple podcasts, or is it just iTunes, Apple Music podcasts? Wherever you listen to podcasts, leave us a review. Tell your neighbors, tell your friends, tell your mom. Until next time, this is Barrel, the Bottle, the Binny's Podcast. I'm Greg. I'm Lexi. I'm Chris. Keep Tasting.