Pure evocation of fresh black raspberry – tartly and seedily palate-staining – mingles with mint; coriander; nutmeg; bittersweet floral perfume; and smoky black tea and Latakia tobacco, in a Brittan 2009 Pinot Noir Gestalt Block whose dynamically interactive complexity and alliance of power with buoyancy, not to mention of viscosity with vivacious juiciness, is utterly uncanny, culminating in a finish that shifts one’s palate with the vibratory force of a freshly-liberated tectonic plate. Let’s compare notes in the future, but I seriously doubt that the ones I write a dozen years from now will be less-filled with superlatives and awe.
After nearly three decades in California – most prominently directing activities at Far Niente and Stags’ Leap Winery – and a long search for the place to pursue his passion for Pinot Noir, Robert Brittan returned in 2004 to his home state, planting his hopes and a wide range of well-mixed vine selections on a high, 180 degree hillside south of McMinnville unusually full of basalt surface rock (along with other volcanic remnants and glacial debris) and exposed to the winds of the so-called Van Duzer corridor at a spot where they eddy, moderating the effect, though the resultant wines – as well as the delay in getting vines to produce even pathetically low yields – are extreme. The wines are extremely (some may think even exaggeratedly), bright, vivacious, vibrant (some might say “nervous”), possessing a mouthwatering savor that only the best – and a sheer mouth-shaking energy such as none others I’ve tasted – among Oregon’s Pinots possess. When my immediate predecessor in this role, Jay Miller, wrote in Issue 197 – with whose text I was confronted only now, on the winery’s web site – that Brittan’s “wines with low pH and firm acidity (without sacrificing flavor) are sure to send bolts of rapture through lovers of great Burgundy,” he predicted precisely my reaction. (And then there’s Chardonnay and Syrah – for more about which see my notes below on the most recent instantiation of each.) Among Pinot cuvees (which enjoy partially-inoculated fermentation at tightly-controlled temperatures; significant post-fermentative maceration; roughly one-quarter new barrels; and bottling already at 11 months) you can choose your – or rather, the vine’s – punishment: Gestalt Block comes from the most wind-exposed west-facing sector with bedrock basalt, while Basalt Block – comprising the balance of productive vines, for now consisting of Pommard and several Dijon clones – is, as it’s name suggests, plenty rocky but in a more jumbled, weathered way. “It was important to me that I find a piece of property that could make more than one Pinot,” notes Brittan, so as he approaches full production – at around 25 vine acres – in the next several years (including recent plantings of California heirloom selections that reflect what he calls “my complete conviction that genetic material is horribly important”), we may well look forward to additional cuvees of Pinot; what’s more, a block of mixed Rhone varieties including even Carignan, Cinsault, and Persan is planned “as a project (hopefully) for my grandchild.” Even if Brittan had not crafted the wines I tasted from his estate, his prowess (or at least, my perception of it) would already be obvious from my assessments of the quite distinctively delicious collections I tasted (and have reported on in this issue) from Ayoub and Winderlea, for both of whom he is the winemaker of record, but about most of whose recent wines – through literally dumb luck on my part – I managed to record my initial tasting notes before learning of their Brittan connection.
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