2013 Pinot Noir Freedom Hill Vineyard Coury Clone

Co-owner/winemaker Jim Anderson told me that in 2013 the timing of the harvest was everything. "It really started to rain like hell in the middle of September, as everybody knows, and the fruit that was already in was safe," he explained, "but a lot of it was from younger vines and some people had also picked underripe grapes." He went on: "If one was willing to wait out the storms, keeping fingers crossed that conditions didn't set up for rot and doing plenty of work dropping fruit, there was a chance to get truly ripe, clean grapes from older, later-maturing vines." Here at Patricia Green, Anderson told me, they picked until October 10th, "and that extra time allowed things in the vineyard to even out and the grapes got back on track to maturity."

Danielle and Laurent Montalieu, who bought this 200-acre estate in 2007 (it was founded in 1971), have built a large and impressively efficient new winery in McMinnville, in which they are producing roughly 2,500 cases from the property's 100 acres of vines, with some of the fruit going to their Solena project and selling off the rest. The emphasis here is on clonal selection and on "emphasizing the differences that specific clones can express from a single vineyard," as Laurent told me. His winemaking resumé in Oregon, where he has been making wine since 1988, is formidable, as is his knowledge of the vineyards of Willamette Valley, given the fact that he has spent "a lot of time in most of them, it seems like" since he arrived at WillaKenzie in 1995.