The rosé is already in Nicolas-Jay’s tasting room and has been well-received - perhaps not surprisingly, given that it was made with the brand’s premium grapes. Everybody, including us, was very excited about it.” “The vintage was terrific in terms of the weather and where the grapes were.
“It’s not like the vintage was bad,” said co-owner Jay Boberg. It opens up that curiosity with your palate about what wine can and can’t be.”ĭomaine Nicolas-Jay in Newberg was among the Oregon producers who made white and rosé wine with Pinot Noir in 2020 rather than risking a smoke-affected red. It really gets them thinking, and they probably won’t be able to guess it. “It’s a really fun wine to blind taste people on. “On the palate, it’s got a lot more body and structure than you get in other white wines,” he added. In warm ones, it can smell almost tropical. In colder years, it tends toward citrus and melon.
Taylor Pfaff, CEO of Left Coast Estate, has always liked White Pinot’s aromatics. There is often a little pear, peach or cherry, as well as a floral component that leans toward jasmine or honeysuckle. Brandborg always detects a bit of quince, green apple and spice components in his wine. It’s common for White Pinot to go through barrel aging for six to 12 months, typically with more neutral than new oak.įlavor profiles can vary depending on the year and location. We’re trading fruit-forwardness for better texture, and something with amazing length and some yeasty characteristics.” “We do that with some of our Chardonnay, too. Stoller fermented some of its wine in concrete and some in oak in 2020, then “married all of those components together in stainless steel,” said Payne-Brown.
“That helps build some structure and character into the wine,” Brandborg noted. Instead, he leaves the wine on the lees and stirs it frequently during aging. He does not encourage malolactic fermentation. Terry Brandborg, winegrower at Brandborg Vineyard & Winery in Elkton and a longtime White Pinot producer, begins with a whole-cluster press, then settles the juice before fermenting it in neutral barrels and puncheons. (Sometimes the wine will have a very pale pink tinge.) From there, it’s treated like a white wine. To make White Pinot, the grapes are very lightly pressed to ensure that little or no color is extracted from the grape skins. Left Coast provides benchmark for White Pinot Noir Left Coast Estate in Rickreall, Ore., received a double gold medal for its 2020 White Pinot Noir at the 2021 Great Northwest Invitational Wine Competition. Like sparkling, it’s great with food, able to pair with lighter fare or cut through a rich meal. White Pinot is essentially a less acidic sparkling base served as a dry table wine. “Often people don’t think about Pinot Noir as a white wine, even though they’ve been drinking sparkling and Champagne for a while,” said Kate Payne-Brown, winemaker at Stoller Family Estate in Dayton. However, the comparison to sparkling wine is an apt one. In the hands of winemaker Joe Wright, White Pinot is now one of Left Coast Estate’s flagship wines at 10,500 cases from the 2020 vintage. Apprehensive about crafting a high volume of something they had no experience with, they decided to put half the grapes to sparkling and half to white wine. During the particularly cold vintage in 2011, the family-owned company looked into making sparkling wine with its grapes. Left Coast Estate in Rickreall, which received a double gold medal for its 2020 White Pinot Noir at the Great Northwest Invitational Wine Competition in October, has been doing that for 10 years.
#FOLIE A DEUX WINE PINOT NOIR 2014 SKIN#
While the skin of Pinot Noir is an inky purple, the pulp has no color, which means it can be used for white wine. And still others produced a wine that has flown under the radar in Oregon for many years: White Pinot Noir. They made sparkling wine for the first time or decided to do a rosé with a miniscule amount of skin contact. Some grappling with that challenge opted for a third path. Should they pick their Pinot Noir and risk making a wine with smoke taint? Or should they abandon the fruit altogether? Those who had ripe grapes during the worst of the fires faced a difficult choice. Many winemakers were able to pick their fruit before smoke came pouring in, or long enough after it dissipated that the grapes were unaffected. The devastating wildfires that hit Oregon’s Willamette Valley in September 2020 made for an unusual vintage. (Photo by Mindy Gimarelli/Stoller Wine Group) Kate Payne-Brown looks over grapes from the 2020 vintage that were harvested at Stoller Family Estate in Dayton, Ore., prior to the September wildfires Payne-Brown and Stoller produced more than 700 cases of White Pinot Noir from the 2020 harvest.