Rhubarb tartness, cherry pit piquancy and beet root earthiness in the Archery Summit 2011 Pinot Noir Looney Vineyard represent a combination that would count as unusual were it not that we’re tasting this particular (and, dare I add, peculiar?) vintage. There is real tannic chew here to accompany the berry seed crunch and cyanic piquancy. Suggestions of radish, lemon rind and raw ginger lend further sharp stimulation to a sustained, almost eye-watering finish. This certainly displays both the tough side of Ribbon Ridge and the tart, incisive extremity of 2011. But I find it both invigorating and intriguing, and would recommend following it – giving it a couple years’ rest, and monitoring carefully thereafter – through at least 2018.
This March, Archery Summit experienced its fourth changing of the winemaking guard, as Chris Mazepink – previously at Benton Lane and Shea – replaced Anna Matzinger, about whose influence and successes there I wrote at length in Issue 202, and who was responsible for the 2011s I tasted this summer. I was surprised to hear Mazepink characterize the 2011 vintage as “slightly fragile and frail as a whole” – he much prefers 2010 – but he admitted to limited experience; and he puts great emphasis on textural richness. Still, his characterization certainly doesn’t apply to many wines that I tasted for this report, even if there were instances in the present collection where I had a sense that perhaps more fermentative extraction and exposure to new wood had been attempted than was in a wine’s best interests. (Since five out of seven wines here are routinely bottled before the following harvest, they in fact received a significantly shorter than usual elevage this vintage.) Matzinger, incidentally, stuck by her selective but often substantial inclusion of stems and whole clusters. (Considerable detail concerning the Archery Summit vineyard sites and what I now must refer to as Matzinger’s legacy can be found in my Issue 202 introduction.)
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