2000 Pinot Noir Blue Slide Ridge

Marcassin Vineyard, the prized Sonoma Coast hillside property owned by Helen Turley and John Wetlaufer, may be Burgundy's lost grand cru.While the vineyards that Turley and Wetlaufer have jointly developed with the Martinelli family have already manifested their considerable potential, there is clearly something special about the Marcassin Vineyard site. As I tasted through the set of Marcassin 2000s with Wetlaufer in early March, it crossed my mind that pinot noir doesn't get much more hedonistic than this, anywhere. And that's not to say that the wines do not possess the nuance and backbone to appeal to the intellect as well. The young 2003s I tasted from barrel showed similarly extraordinary potential, with the Blue Slide Ridge and Marcassin Vineyard cuvees offering incredible concentration and sweetness without loss of definition or energy. Still, it must be noted that the kind of laissez-faire winemaking and elevage practiced by Helen Turley involves a degree of risk:in the past certain Marcassin wines were bottled with too much haze (bottling without filtration is something of a fetish here, and the wines, according to Wetlaufer, are assembled in tank only hours before being bottled), at the expense of some of their aromatic clarity. And the recent pair of 1999 pinots I tasted in April were too advanced for their age (the Marcassin Vineyard bottling in particular showed a distinctly oxidative character).With the advantage of hindsight, it's easy to say that these pinots should have been released to mailing-list customers two or three years ago.