Lightly-cooked purple plum and blackberry mingle with savory, salted beef stock in Boedecker 2009 Pinot Noir Athena, whose integration of fine-grained tannin goes hand in hand with a suggestion of bone meal suffusion, which along with mossy intimations of forest floor make for a finish as fascinating as it is delightfully fruity and saliva-inducing. I imagine this will be worth following for at least half a dozen years. This cuvee's namesake opines that it is more likely than "Stewart" to show an herbaceous side of Pinot, but in this vintage I find what one could call mineral and animal dimensions its most striking features. The affable and articulate husband-wife team of Stewart Boedecker and Athena Pappas moved from hi-tech to winemaking; pursued the latter for five years at the Carlton Wine Studio; then moved in 2008 to their own facility in Portland. The Boedecker regimen for consistently excellent Pinot involves - in addition to close and creative collaboration with just a few long-term suppliers - only a few days cold soak; spontaneous ferment; sparing pigeage and otherwise highly cautious extraction; but up to a week's post fermentative cap contact; and regular stirring of the lees in barrel, where all of the top wines remain for 19 months. Incidentally, there is a Shea Vineyard Pinot Noir from this cellar and I can't explain why the proprietors didn't choose to show it to me even though, for example, they showed me rose. A fascination from this cellar - to call it a curiosity would suggest too little respect - is that each partner arrives at his or her own barrel selection which is in turn bottled under his or her name, the latter Athena cuvee - which tends to originate more in sedimentary rather than eroded basaltic soils - being released later based in an impression that it remains both tighter and in a phase of primary fruitiness for longer. (White wines from this cellar are bottled under the "Pappas Wine Co." label, but following an existing Wine Advocate convention - and so as to address wines of common authorship in one place - they are reviewed under the "Boedecker Cellars" heading.) Tel. (503) 866-0095

This lean, snappy red shows a floral cast to the raspberry flavors, finishing with ripeness, moderate intensity and refined tannins. Drink now through 2015. 700 cases made. -HS