2004 Pinot Noir One Acre

I tasted a wide range of wines with proprietor Ted Lemon at Littorai. For now, my sense is that 2013 favors Chardonnay over Pinot, which is a common refrain for the vintage. The 2013 Chardonnays are striking and precise. I found the 2013 Pinots a bit clenched, which Lemon attributes to a period of cold weather just before my tasting. That may be, but I always taste around the same time of year. My sense is that some of the Pinots may have been impacted by a brief spell of rain in late June. At this time of year, ideally, vegetative growth has stopped so the vine can direct all of its energy to the grapes. But the rain set off vegetative growth, which could explain the fact that some of the 2013s are a bit less deep than the 2012s. It will be interesting to see where things are once the wines are bottled. As for the 2012, they have pretty much turned out as I had expected. The Littorai wines remain some of the purest expressions of the Sonoma Coast and Anderson Valley readers will find. In 2013, Lemon used a little more whole clusters in the Pinots than in 2012, but the whole cluster inclusion here is never on the high side. In the cellar, the wines see minimal handling. I have also included notes on a few older wines I tasted. Readers might also enjoy this short video with Ted Lemon I shot just after our tasting.

Ted Lemon made the decision to rack his 2004 chardonnays-for the first time since 1995-as the malolactic fermentations took more than a year to finish, and he felt that he needed to remove these delicate wines from their gross lees to preserve their elegance. The wines went into tank in October and were bottled in February, about a month before I tasted them. Lemon told me that both 2004 and 2003 were hot growing seasons, but that 2003 witnessed more heat during the harvest itself. And 2004 was his highest-acid vintage for chardonnay since 1998, another year when Lemon felt the wine's aromatic qualities were delicate. In both years, though, sugar levels in the pinot noir grapes were zooming at the end of the season. Lemon noted that in his early years, he tended to vinify pinot noir with about one-third whole clusters, but since 1998 he has normally destemmed all of his fruit.