Our notes on this were so great I am just going to put there here verbatum:
Juicy and bright and perfect summer wine –
Strawberry candy – hibiscus – rose petals
Crushed raspberries – brambly
Super crushable – checks all the CA pinot boxes, would make Oregon people really happy
High tones that are spring time – feels like celebrating flowers blooming and fruit appearing on trees
Sandlewood.
Really enjoyable
2 kinds of wines – one you sit around and talk about one you pour and then go oh we drank al that already this is column two.
This fruit was fermented with native yeasts for 10 days. The wine was then pressed directly into French oak barrels (15% new, 85% neutral), where it hibernated untouched for 12 months.
2017 Major Wine Pinot Noir
$31.99
“My approach is that I love the idea of just going straight from Vine to Wine. I want you to drink the fruit off the vine, the way it came off. I rarely cold soak. I love that everything has always been native yeast. As soon as it goes dry I press it off. I do destem. In the beginning, I wanted to be whole cluster guy, but ultimately went in the opposite direction. Each year I’ve dialed back the stems to about 15-20%. Always better to let the grapes decide what they want to be. Enough to add just enough tannin that’s it. I know La Encantada is pretty tannic so I know I don’t need to do more than 15-20%. Now it is pretty much all destemmed because that is what it wants to be.
I do one new french oak barrel every other year. The rest goes into neutral oak. I was using Francois Ferres barrels the first few years, but no matter how old or “neutral” the barrels were, they continued to infuse some amount of oak into the wine. Turns out there’s a lot of sugar naturally in the trees FF sources. I now use Sirugue barrels because they source from forests whose trees have little to no sugar in their wood. Ever since, my Pinot has opened up its more natural vegetal and tea flavors that I was losing in prior years.”