Vintage 2008 update
With all the fruit now in the winery, and the first fermentations moving along nicely, it’s time to reflect for a moment on the flurry of activity over the last 11 days. We started picking on October 9th with a couple of tons at Coats & Whitney vineyard, finished on the 16th with some beautiful fruit from our blocks of Momtazi, and I’m very happy to say that we are indeed thrilled with all of our fruit this year.
It was a fairly compressed harvest, with all of the fruit coming in in the space of one week (often it can be 10 days to two weeks+ from beginning to end.) Everything truly ripened at about the same time, and generally at the same levels of ripeness. It’s a vintage that should really favor our style – natural alcohol levels will be in the low 13s, and I haven’t seen such nice acid/pH balance in the fruit in our ten years of winemaking. I have very high hopes for these 2008s. Pinot of course takes a lot of left-turns and sees a lot of peaks and valleys over the course of élévage, but I’m betting at the end of the day we’ll have some pretty, delicious, and well-balanced wines to bottle one year from now. The one downside is that we will be about 1,000 cases short of what we would normally have produced this year – yields were a miserly 1 ton to the acre in a number of our blocks. The clusters and berries were small – with excellent skin-to-juice ratios, but they just never sized-up as we expected them to over the course of the season. We just won’t have enough wine to sell when these are released in the spring of 2010. This has hit us before, both in 2004 and 2005. Welcome to the wonderful world of winemaking!
Being able to say we’ve had a top-quality year was not a given just a few months ago – we had a late, wet, and cool spring, resulting in the vineyards being at least two weeks behind all throughout the growing season. A quirky, cooler summer didn’t bode well, and it wasn’t until September that the warmth and sunshine we needed finally arrived. When it finally came, it stayed, and though we didn’t make up any time, we ended up with beautifully ripe grapes in the end. 2008 will go down as one of the latest harvests in Willamette Valley Pinot history – and it looks like we’ve got the potential for a great one.
Please plan to join us to celebrate the harvest – our 3rd annual La Paulée de Carlton tasting happens all day on Saturday November 1st – and it’s your first chance to order futures of the lovely 2007 Audrey Pinot. Then, it’s our La Paulée Dinner in the cellars that night – a few seats still remain for this bacchanalian evening, and we’d love you to be part of it. Book your seats with Kelly Karr at 503 319 5827 or kellykarr@scottpaul.com
