Bethel HeightsPinot Noir2009Willamette ValleyOregon

Harvest dates: October 1 - 20, 2009

Fruit source: 32% Bethel Heights Vineyard, 28% Justice Vineyard, 13% Jessie James Vineyard, 10% Lewman Vineyard, 8% Elton Vineyard, 7% Zena Crown Vineyard, 2% Carter Vineyard
Finished wine: Alcohol: 13.2%, pH: 3.59, TA: 5.4
5116 cases produced.
Bottled July 28, 2010
Suggested retail $28

THE 2009 VINTAGE got off to a slow start, but a warm May and June gave us a very successful fruit set. Perhaps the vines were compensating for the poor flowering in 2008, but in any case 2009 delivered the most generous crop of the decade. The summer was warm and sometimes hot, with a couple of extraordinary heat spikes, bringing on a relatively
early harvest. September was sunny and warm, and continued dry in October but cool enough to extend hang time. The grapes were quite ripe, with great acidity and flavor development.

VINIFICATION:

The fruit was destemmed into 1.5-ton fermentation bins and kept cold for five days before fermentation began. Following ten to fourteen-day
fermentations, the new wine went into French oak barrels (10% new) for nine months. It was bottled with a Stelvin closure.

TASTING NOTES:

Aromas of ripe raspberry and strawberry with underlying notes of stonefruit, cedar, and rose petals. The palate is pure raspberries and Royal Anne cherries with orange zest and just a flicker of oak
spice in the background. This wine is balanced by a bright and balancing core of acidity and fine grain tannins that will help this wine age gracefully over the next decade.

Willamette Valley Hillsides:
Oregon’s wine pioneers came to the Willamette Valley looking for the perfect place to grow Pinot noir – a place where longer hours of daylight and cooler growing conditions allow wine grapes to ripen slowly,
with a long period of flavor development at the end of the growing season, and harvest in late September or early October. Ninety
percent of the Pinot noir grown in Oregon is grown in the Willamette Valley. But once that most fundamental choice has
been made, it must be said that most of the acres in the Willamette Valley are not really suitable for growing fine wine. Indeed, most
of the acres of the Willamette Valley are deep, rich valley-floor soils brought to us all the way from Montana by the Missoula
Floods at the end of the last ice age. These valley floor soils are paradise for a great diversity of crops, but they can spell trouble
for Pinot noir. Pinot noir at low elevations is subject to frost damage in the spring, and in such deep soils it can become overly
vigorous, and unable to ripen its fruit properly.
In almost all cases, the great Pinots of the Willamette Valley are grown on hillside sites well above the valley floor. That is the
common denominator of the Willamette Valley appellation, regardless of a significant diversity of soil types and weather patterns
in the various sub-AVA’s of the Valley. The fruit for our 2009 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir came from a number of different
vineyards within our own sub-AVA, the Eola-Amity Hills. Our own estate vineyards (Bethel Heights and Justice) provide the
core of this blend, which is rounded out with fruit from several well-established nearby vineyards that we have come to
appreciate.