Another wonderfully bright, textural dry Riesling from Montinore. The 2019 season was cool, fresh and long, with mild spring conditions followed by a warm summer with a crisp ending. As a result, the Riesling fruit retained mouth-watering natural acidity while slowly reaching perfect ripeness and phenolic maturity.

Montinore Estate’s Riesling blocks are planted on a south-facing slope on the property overlooking Graham Lake. Fruit from these 40-year-old, own-rooted Geisenheim 68 clone vines is handpicked and whole cluster-pressed before cool fermentation in stainless-steel barrels. Once bottled, the wine is held back for up to two years before release.

It leads with aromas of white peach, citrus, sweet summer flowers and chalky freshness before a clean and pure palate brimming with mouth-watering zesty flavours, refreshing acidity and a lovely spice-flecked complexity. This is delicious and will also age beautifully over the coming years.

Eyrie Vineyards pioneered Pinot Gris in the Willamette Valley and arguably the New World. David Lett planted America’s first commercial Pinot Gris vines in the Eyrie Vineyard at the same time he was putting his Pinot Noir vines in the soil. Eyrie set the bar and remains at the pinnacle of Gris production in the area. Eyrie takes the long way around when it comes to Pinot Gris, aging wines on lees for up to four times longer than many of their more commercial competitors and allowing full malolactic conversion. The result is wines of supple texture complementing fresh acidities and incredible ageability.

Pinot Gris is a core tenet of the Eyrie tale, and plantings have increased due to demand. Pinot Gris vines can now be found in the Roland Green, Sisters and Daphne vineyards, as well as the original 1965 Eyrie Vineyard plantings. The 2021 season was warm, with long, dry periods punctuated by short spells of rain. The summer was warm but brought into balance by a cool close to the season in September and October. Chilly nights preserved acid freshness throughout, something Eyrie values deeply. Handpicked fruit is destemmed, pressed and fermented in stainless-steel tank. The wine sees full malolactic conversion and rests in tank for 11 months on lees before bottling.

One could never accuse Ashes & Diamonds of not aiming for the stars—this wine is a homage to the white wines of Domaine de Chevalier. It is an equal blend of Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc from two sites in the southern Napa Valley. The Semillon component is sourced from the grape’s oldest site in California. Located in Yountville, Kendall Hoxsey’s Yount Mill Vineyard is home to 1962 vines that are head-trained, dry-grown and extremely low-yielding; Khaledi describes the fruit as “simply majestic”. To this, winemaker Steve Matthiasson blends mature-vine Sauvignon Blanc from the Ashes & Diamonds vineyard in Napa’s Oak Knoll district. Both vineyards benefit from the cool, foggy mornings and afternoon sea breezes rolling in from San Pablo Bay. These serve as a moderating influence and aid in preserving natural acidity and racy freshness.

In the cellar, the fruit naturally co-ferments in barrel. The wine spends 10 months on fine lees in French oak (31% new) without stirring before it goes to bottle. Unusually for a white, it is released after three years in bottle, during which time the pungency of Sauvignon Blanc takes a back seat to Semillon’s lemongrass and key lime pie characters. Number 5 indicates the wine’s fifth release. According to its crafter, it is “fully ripe and textured, yet bright, zesty and supremely ageworthy”. Time in bottle has served this wine well; it’s beautifully balanced, unfurling with complexity and culminating in a lengthy, elegant close.

This increasingly impressive Chenin Blanc is drawn from some of Clarksburg’s oldest vines, planted in the 1960s and sourced from a long-term organic grower. The grapes are picked in two lots: those from the sunny side of the vine were crushed to release extract, while fruit from the shadier side was pressed as whole clusters using a very long, firm cycle. The musts are fermented with indigenous yeasts and were raised in eight-year-old, low-toast Burgundy barrels. Kelley uses more and more solids each year, with the wines building texture and drive from their time on lees.

This year, the fruit was picked at about the same ripeness as in 2019, but the winemakers modified how they pressed the grapes to capture brighter acidity. Simply put, the less you break the ‘cake’ of solids during pressing, the lower the pH of the resulting must. This modification means Kelley can pick several weeks later than in previous years while achieving lower pHs—and thus greater freshness—in the finished wine. Expect a tension-filled and chalky white marrying the engaging texture of well-ripened Chenin Blanc with lovely clarity, fine-boned texture and impressive length. It doesn’t seem too early to call this out as a new Californian benchmark.

The Borgo Pass vineyard is located in Monroe in the southern Willamette Valley, north of Eugene and south of Salem. The Pinot Meunier vines were planted in 1985 by Mark Debose and Jan O’Banion on their 17-hectare vineyard, which at the time was already planted to Pinot Noir, Gamay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. Approximately 40% of the vines on the property are over 40 years old, and all are on their own roots. Like Alsea vineyard, Borgo Pass is home to Bellpine soils—a variant of the famous Jory soils found in the Willamette Valley—which are rich in iron and have excellent drainage. The dry-farmed site sits at 140 metres elevation and is organically managed.

The fruit was handpicked, sorted, destemmed and fermented in open-top vessels using a pied de cuve started in the vineyard. After four weeks with daily punch-downs, the wine was pressed and settled before going to old barrels for maturation. A lover of great food as well as wine, Barnaby Tuttle made this wine with game in mind. Full of brambly fruits and spice, it will shine even brighter paired with the right wild bird. Pheasant would be a fabulous place to start. 

Eyrie’s Trifolium brings together all three red varieties grown on its five estate vineyards. Some unwelcome rain at flowering decimated yields for the Eyrie team in 2020, leaving them 60% down overall. So, Jason decided to blend all his reds from the season into one wine. It’s important to note that Jason considers the quality of the vintage among the very best he’s seen. We’ll let him explain: “The density and concentration of this vintage are like nothing we’ve ever seen, putting even vintages like 1988 and 1998 to shame. Yet due to the cool summer, the natural acidity is as close to perfect as we could ever hope for, and alcohols are modest.”

What you’re getting with the Trifolium is Eyrie’s best Pinot Noir fruit (so the Willamette Valley’s best Pinot), including the material that would usually make the flagship single-vineyard bottlings, combined with Meunier and Trousseau, from an excellent vintage.

The blend is Pinot Noir (77%), Trousseau (15%) and Meunier (8%), picked by hand, destemmed and fermented in a range of vessels. Punch-downs were done by hand twice daily, and the wine matured for 28 months in wood, 17% of which was new.

Inspired by the great wines he had tasted from Montigny-les-Arsures in Jura, Jason Lett planted the Willamette Valley’s first Trousseau Noir in 2012 in the 20-acre Sisters Vineyard. This directly south-facing vineyard is the lowest site at 67 metres, and the youngest in the Eyrie fold. It’s named after the Pinot sisters (Blanc, Gris and Noir) and is planted to seven different varieties.

Hand-picked fruit was destemmed and fermented naturally in small, open-top 11-hectolitre vessels. Ferments were hand-plunged twice daily before a light pressing. The wine was aged in old oak puncheons for 10 months. To preserve the purity and bright nature of the delicate Trousseau fruit, only seasoned wood was used, and the wine was bottled unfined and unfiltered with just moderate amounts of sulphur.

Philip Togni’s first interaction with sweet wine was in 1946. Hitchhiking back to London from Venice, he carried a two-litre flagon of sweet fortified white wine for the journey. Fast forward to the 1980s, and Togni is planting his home site in the Spring Mountain District when he runs out of Cabernet vines. Rather than order more, Togni decided to plant the last 39 vines to a little-known Muscat variety called Black Hamburg. With it, he’ll make a sweet red wine to rival the famed Vin de Constance of the South African Cape. 

At less than a half-acre, Togni’s vines were Napa’s only planting of the variety. Its susceptibility to Pearce’s disease, alas, sealed the small plot’s fate, and after many attempts to salvage it, the decision to replant to Cabernet Sauvignon was made. So, this is one of the last releases of a piece of Napa Valley history.

The grapes are harvested very late in the season when the fruit is very ripe (19.4 Baumé in 2013), often shrivelled on the vine. The fruit macerates for about seven days to give colour and is then pressed. The wine is aged in very old oak barrels for just under a year before bottling. The final residual sugar clocks in at 329 g/L and the alcohol at 14%.