On Audrey & hitting the road (literally)
I’m now pretty much organized and ready to take off for Burgundy on Tuesday morning, but first the excitement of the ’08 Audrey release party on Saturday! There is no doubt in my mind that this is the best wine we’ve put into a bottle since we started. It has everything I cherish about Pinot Noir – pretty fruit on a lithe and elegant frame, understated yet complex and seductive, a sense of delicacy, and a bright purity and silkiness that define what this magical grape can do when grown on 40 year-old vines in the sweet-spot of Oregon’s Dundee Hills. In short – it’s nice grape juice, and we hope you’ll like it!
If you tasted it last fall when we were offering it as futures, it should be interesting to check in on it again now with another 6 months of bottle age – the developments have been mostly in the aromatics, with a very pretty swirl of fruits and flowers on the nose, really starting to gain in complexity now. I look forward to seeing you here on Saturday 12-5 for the official release party – it’s a great time to pick up your futures that you ordered in the fall, or to grab some now for the first time. Only 200 cases were produced, and most of that was sold as futures, so it will probably not be around too long. (The 95-point review by Paul Gregutt in Wine Enthusiast just might speed up proceedings a bit as well…)
Looking down over the village of Pommard
I’ll be manning the tasting room by myself on Sunday – the first Sunday we’re open this year, which reminds me to remind you of our new summer hours: 1-5 Friday, Saturday & Sunday, and by appointment other days and times. Then on Monday I’ll be pouring our new releases and a bunch of great Burgs for a few hundred of the top restaurant and retail accounts throughout Oregon – it’s our distributor’s annual spring portfolio tasting, and I look forward to seeing many of our great supporters there!
Then Tuesday I’m off to Burgundy for my spring tasting trip. I’ll be seeing 18 producers this time, including the newest members of the family - Freddy Mugnier, Freddy Lafarge, Comte Armand and Hugues Pavelot. As you may know, I have lusted after the Mugnier wines for years (they make up the largest part of my personal cellar, in fact), so to now have them in our portfolio is monumentally exciting. Then adding Lafarge and Armand – by many accounts the best producers in Volnay & Pommard respectively, and whose wines I’ve collected and adored for eons – is beyond icing on the cake. And the best part may be the addition of Pavelot – for we now will have the best source of the great value wines from Savigny-Les-Beaune – a hole in our portfolio that I’ve been hoping to fill since we started.
Of course I may encounter a good meal or two along the way, and perhaps a nice old bottle – all of which I’ll be reporting on from the road via our Facebook page, Twitter, and this blog. I’m test driving our new iPad this time, and plan to do the whole trip with just the iPhone and iPad, no MacBook this time – so hopefully the somewhat unreliable internet & cell infrastructure in the villages is reliable enough to keep me in timely contact.
I will not indulging my eating or drinking passions too heavily, though – with my training program for the wine-country half-marathon I’m just not as hedonistic as I was before. I’m really enjoying my runs – I’m up to a comfortable 10K jog 3 times a week. This will be the first time I’m seriously running while in Burgundy, and I’m hoping that it may actually help with the jet-lag that often gives me a good whack during my first 48 hours over there. Volnay to Pommard and back about three times should be a good circuit – we’ll see how it goes.
My running route in Burgundy
The semi-finals of the Champions League soccer tournament will kick-off while I’m over there, with three of my four favorite teams still in it. Thiébault Huber of Domaine Huber-Verdereau and I share a love for the team from Lyon, and we’ll definitely get together at his house in Volnay to watch the match when they play Bayern Munich. Barcelona should win it all again, but it’s a funny game where anything can happen, so I’m looking forward to some exciting matches.
See you here in Carlton this weekend!
