The 2013 Pinot Noir Temperance Hill Vineyard was completely destemmed and sees 22% new oak for ten months. It has an intriguing bouquet, quite complex with brambly red berry fruit, cold black tea and bay leaf, more tertiary in style than I was expecting. The palate is medium-bodied with grainy tannin that feels a little tough. This is a masculine Pinot Noir, grippy in the mouth; however, it needs to show more flesh on the finish.

The 2012 Pinot Noir Temperance Hill Vineyard, from purchased fruit in Eola-Amity Hills on basaltic soils, is matured in one-third new oak. It has a very harmonious and pure bouquet that is more convincing than the Zenith Vineyard '12. It has a smooth and silky palate with a keen line of acidity. It is more backward than the Zenith Vineyard, quite solid in the mouth, with very good substance that lends it a long, meaty/dried blood finish. David Adelsheim preferred the Zenith Vineyard this vintage, but personally, I find the Temperance Hill more intellectual.

Sour cherry and red raspberry are laced with piquant and pungent orange and lemon rinds in the Adelsheim 2011 Pinot Noir Temperance Hill Vineyard, exhibiting a cut and juiciness typical for its vintage but reinforced by the effects of a cool, breezy site. There is considerable tannin, but it’s fine-grained, and this finishes with sap, cut, bursting intensity and seed-chewing invigoration, all set-off against an undertone of wet stone. Look for high-performance through at least 2018. Adelsheim winemaker David Paige maintains, “I instantly became a better winemaker when I finally let go of worrying about why it is that grapes from one site taste so different from those harvested elsewhere and focused instead on making the best wine out of them.” The occasion for his remark was a comparison of adjacent Quarter Mile Lane and Bryan Creek Vineyards, which were planted from the same Adelsheim mother block on soils and with exposures identical as nearly as their proprietor and his team let alone yours truly can tell. “Sure, we handle the fruit a bit differently now,” notes Paige, “but that’s in response to the differences we observe right off the vine.” Paige insists, though, that he is anything but a recipe winemaker even relative to a given vineyard or block. “I drive some of the people who work with me crazy I do so much tasting in the cellar, because what I suggest we do with this particular fermentor based on how it’s tasting today might be 180 degrees removed from what I thought we were going to want to do a day or two ago. But now I have more data.” (For a capsule history of this estate and details on its nowadays extensive vineyards, consult my issue 202 report.) Tel. (503) 538-3652

From another site on the replanting of whose block in question David Adelsheim had a hand, his 2010 Pinot Noir Temperance Hill Vineyard is rather reduced and gamey in the nose but already anticipates the tart, bright raspberry fruit exhibited on the palate. Considerable tannin compounds the effect of tartness in an undeniably long and penetrating but at the same time rather severe and austere finish. This deserves another look, or a longer time open to the air than I was unfortunately able to give it. Oregon pioneer David Adelsheim – who planted his original vineyard on Quarter Mile Lane in the Chehalem foothills north of Newberg in 1972 – hired Davis-trained David Paige in 2001, and the latter has been winemaker here since. Extensive new facilities were added to the 1993 Calkins Lane winery in 2008 to better accommodate what – thanks to an expansion of vineyards beginning in 1989, facilitated and accelerated by a partnership with Lynn and Jack Loackera begun in 1994 – has grown to 190 acres representing 11 different vineyard sites farmed by the Adelsheim team across the northern fringe of the Willamette Valley. (There are often nearly 200 different fermentations going on here in a vintage.) Fruit farmed by others – which constitutes at most 25% of total production – tends to be taken from sites that Adelsheim and Paige consider especially exciting and that complement their own vineyards geographically and stylistically, such as that from Temperance Hill or Zenith, both in the relatively distant and distinctly different Eola-Amity Hills. Pinot is nearly always destemmed; typically receives 4-6 days cold soak; is usually inoculated; occupies mostly small fermentors with cautious extraction via punch-down and occasionally pulse-air; with the young wine pressed before or after complete dryness depending on lot, and settled to remove all but the finest residue of lees before going to barrels, of which seldom more than 25% are new, and from which the wine is removed for bottling after only 9-10 months. Paige opines that “If you don’t got for much extraction or a lot of new oak character, we find the wines come around and make plenty of sense by the summer.” Chaptalization his been relatively infrequent in recent years, Paige suggests, and then only in small increments; whether to acidify is judged lot by lot “but we’ve done it somewhere in pretty much every vintage. We do get high natural acidity, but a lot of it is malic, especially in years like 2010.” At their best, understatement, firm structure, and brightness have, in my experience, counted among the virtues of Adelsheim wines, but I have to say that I would have welcomed a bit more emphatic and supple performance than that delivered by the majority of those I tasted on the occasion of my June visit, especially considering their prices. Adelsheim’s numerous single-vineyard Pinots are rendered in less (sometimes much less) than 300-case volumes and most are sold directly from the winery. Tel. (503) 538-3652

The 2009 Pinot Noir Temperance Hill displays herbal notes in the background along with savory, meaty aromas leading to a dense, round, well-balanced wine with good depth and complexity. It will offer prime drinking through 2019. Adelsheim has produced a solid set of 2009 Pinot Noirs. Tel. (503) 538-3652; www.adelsheim.com