While the inexpensive, generic Pinot Noir that Boedecker bottled in September (early by their standards) was a bit drying and not up to the standard set by its 2010 counterpart or indeed all of the other Pinots I’ve tasted from this producer, their 2010 Pinot Noir Athena – featuring fruit from five different vineyards and as many clonal variants – represents another fine success. “What we ‘always’ put into our two blends didn’t hold true this year.” relates Pappas. “We talked about how (maybe) we don’t need to do the blind tasting anymore, we know what we’re doing. And then we did the tasting, and I ended up getting the Wadenswil and Stewart got the Shea 115” a reversal of standing practice. Fresh blackberry and elderberry are wreathed in peat- and Latakia tobacco-like smokiness and tinged with piquant walnut oil on a polished palate with a not unpleasant humus-like undertone, all of which makes for a bittersweet and refreshingly tart-edged but metaphorically dark presentation. There is a touch of tannic roughness here but I suspect that it will iron-out over the next half dozen years while the flavor intrigue persists.
This year, I visited and tasted with husband and wife team Stewart Boedecker and Athena Pappas at their Portland facility, in an impressively neatly-kept “industrial” district that appears to favor wineries, breweries, and other artisanal endeavors. (Vienna may always retain the largest vineyard acreage of any major metropolitan area, but I can imagine that Portland might eventually rival if not surpass the Bay Area in number of urban winemaking facilities.) Boedecker opines that “2011 was a lot like 2010 in that things weren’t ripening and weren’t ripening ... and then, it seemed as though something in the plant just flipped and within a few days all of the flavors came up at once.” That said, believing that green wood spelled risk, they elected to de-stem all of their 2011 fruit, whereas from 2010 – whose Pinots they are currently selling – a significant share of stems (and yet-higher share of intact berries) was incorporated. “We didn’t have as high a malic fraction of acidity, though, in 2011 as in 2010,” Boedecker adds, so buffering was less of a concern and no tartaric acid added to the musts. A few lots from 2011 were chaptalized by a half a percent, but mostly Boedecker and Pappas worked – and stuck – with fruit of around 13% potential alcohol. (For more about the Boedecker background and regimen, consult my issue 202 report. I have once again treated white wines vinified and marketed under the name “Pappas Wine Co.” as representing a sub-label of Boedecker Cellars, and hence reviewed them under that heading.)
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