The 2015 Pinot Noir Premier Cuvee offers a pale to medium ruby-purple color and notes of warm red cherries, dried roses and baking spices with hints of black pepper and tree bark. Medium to full-bodied and laden with perfumed red berry flavors, it has a silken texture and just enough freshness lifting the finish.

The 2014 Pinot Noir Premier Cuvee reveals a medium ruby-purple color and notes of kirsch, red currant jelly and warm red plums over nuances of Chinese five spice and lavender. Medium-bodied with a nice expression of red berry preserves flavors, it is nicely framed with soft tannins and finishes spicy.

The 2012 Pinot Noir Premier Cuvée comes from six vineyard sites and is designed to represent the vintage rather than individual site (it constitutes around half the estate's production.) Matured for ten months in 30% new French oak barrels, it has a pleasant blackberry and raspberry-scented bouquet, nicely focused, clean and pure with just a dab of wild mushroom. The palate is medium-bodied with uncomplicated boysenberry, dried fig and raspberry coulis bouquet that segues nicely into a balanced palate: slightly grainy in texture with a conservative but fresh finish. Enjoy this over the next 4 or 5 years.

The tart-edged blackberry fruit of Archery Summit’s 2011 Pinot Noir Premier Cuvee – around half of which comes from their Arcus vineyard – picks up vanilla, resin, and spice from the barrels (one-third new) in which it was matured. A sweet-tart and subtly smoky finish reveals a sense of confiture unusual for this vintage; but there is also a vintage-typical bit of berry seed crunch whose bitterness is reinforced by a hint of tannic gum-numbing. (The alcohol is a modest, vintage-typical bare-13%.) I’d anticipate drinking this over the next couple of years. 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.) Tel. (503) 864.4300

Clear, bright ripe cherry and red raspberry fruit and a polished but firm mouth feel make for a satisfying Archery Summit 2010 Pinot Noir Premier Cuvee (nearly half of which comes from the Arcus vineyard), its notes of sage and ginger running pungently from nose to juicily prolonged, if as yet a bit reductively, tight finish. This should demonstrate at least a half dozen years’ stamina, and hopefully gain some richness and nuance in the process. Amid the boilerplate on Archery Summit’s web site, I failed to find even a mention of this estate’s visionary 1993 founder Gary Andrus, let alone any sense of its colorful early history, which at the time I followed from afar, but several times discussed with him. Then again, it’s not as though the current owners of this quadripartite hundred-plus acre Dundee icon are trying to insert themselves prominently into the picture; in fact, I’m given to understand that the lack of any sense for who or what is Crimson Wine Group that one derives from a perusal of their web site is entirely by design and in keeping with their desire to maintain a low profile. Happily, internationally-experienced Anna Matzinger – who, following three years as assistant winemaker, took the reins here in 2002 (the year after Andrus sold his remaining interests) – couldn’t hide her light under a basket press if she wanted to, and proves to be as savvy, inquisitive and insightful in her perspectives on late 20th century wine history as she is on matters viticultural and vinificatory. I was relieved as well as delighted once I got down to tasting, at how long and decisive the strides are with which she is clearly walking the proverbial walk. Archery Summit’s wines may with good reason have already impressed a lot people – as witness inter alia the prices at which they trade – but I think we can rest assured that the best is yet to come. In addition to Archery Summit’s four Dundee vineyards (and a fifth was just purchased) they hold a long-term lease on Looney Vineyard in Ribbon Ridge. (For a bit more about each site, see my tasting notes on the corresponding 2010s.) Spontaneous fermentation is being paralleled by a three year academic research project to identify and follow the surprisingly diverse range of yeasts coming from each of the estate’s vineyards, and which Matzinger suspects remain efficacious “through the first couple of weeks of fermentation, after which probably a dominant Saccharomyces species probably takes over.” She isn’t wary of adding tartaric acid (including in high-malic 2010) and favors selective but generally substantial inclusion of stems in her fermentations, which take place largely in small, customized steel bins that permit gentle “tip over,” and in the estate’s impressive collection of wooden uprights. “I like a long, cold (pre-fermentative) soak,” she says, and her preference is for extended vatting times, running past dryness – “and on Renegade Ridge, we are farming that biodynamically, so I like to keep that in for 28 days, a full lunar cycle.” Fermentative extraction is “recently (utilizing) much fewer punch-downs – sometimes just one a day, versus the six (!) that were happening when I came here in 1999 – and more pouring-overs: particularly in the last two vintages when we’ve been chaptalizing, this was a great tool, and I wonder whether it helped us produce glycerol; (anyway) I like the idea. I have become a fan of cleaner wine to barrel,” she adds – indicating another departure from her predecessors’ regimens – so the wine, all free-run, is settled before going to (30-60% new) barrel, a precaution against reduction that most Oregon winemakers find needful. Racking and bottling is accomplished using a tank elevator that, like Matzinger, I wonder now why I’ve never seen anywhere else. The estate’s “premier cuvee” – assembled from all of its vineyards and bottled at 11 months – represents up to 5,000 cases, or 40-60% of total production, so that as with a great many Oregon wineries, the later-bottled, single-vineyard wines of which there is typically only 10-20% as much, are sold largely direct.Tel. (503) 864-4300