The 2014 Red Hills Estate Pinot Noir spent 13 months in 47% new French barrels, including 9% whole cluster fruit. It has a well-defined bouquet with scents of blackberry, huckleberry, a little undergrowth and truffle. The palate is medium-bodied with good density, the tannins a little finer than say the 2012. There is a slight salinity here, more spice than the 2014 Renegade Ridge (cardamom and cumin), and it comes with a pleasingly persistent finish. Give this 12-24 months in bottle before broaching.

The 2012 Red Hills Estate Pinot Noir comes from a flat, south-facing vineyard on 20-year-old self-rooted Pommard clones. This vintage includes 14% whole cluster from fruit picked October 3-17 undergoing native yeast ferment with ten months in 46% new French oak. The wood component is more conspicuous here and seeps into the brambly red berry fruit profile mixed with clove and allspice. The palate is medium-bodied with a vein of dark chocolate on the entry. It has a slightly powdery texture with good weight and a focused, quite linear finish, hints of vanilla pod on the finish. I feel that the new oak here is just a degree or two too generous and shaves away some of the complexity and poise that nature gave.

Cinnamon-, bacon- and barrel toast-tinged sweet-tart cherry fruit dominates the Archery Summit 2011 Pinot Noir Red Hills Estate and there is an over-abundance of rustic tannin for which sheer fruitiness and vintage-typical sense of tart fruit acids insufficiently compensate. (That having been claimed, I should re iterate a point made when I reviewed the 2010, namely that the mix of barrels chosen for this cuvee and the way they are used strikes me as detrimental, but the fact that they have remained a constant strongly suggests that some tasters very much like the effect.) I won’t deny that this has impact and grip. Those who feel comfortable about a lot of toasted and tannic oak may want to follow this for the next few 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

From a rocky southern exposure in the northern Dundee Hills that constitutes their second largest block of vines, Archery Summit’s 2010 Pinot Noir Red Hills Estate displays a smoky, toasty, and resinous overtone from barrel that I associate with the two tonneliers favored for this bottling (and could do without!). It also evinces strongly gamey, smoked meat, and brown spice qualities that Matzinger says are site-typical (and which prompted her distinctive choice of barrels, not reflected in any other Archery Summit offering). Expansive and rich, its abundant dark berry fruit is almost confectionary, an impression reinforced by hints of maple syrup and macaroon. But despite the allusions to sugar cured ham, I miss any element of genuinely mouthwatering salinity in the finish. I speculate that this will be best drunk within the next half dozen years, but perhaps in the process its oak inflections and caramelized elements will more fully integrate. 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

The 2009 Pinot Noir Red Hills Estate spent 15 months in barrel. Notes of vanilla, raspberry, and chocolate lead to a wine with greater density and richness than the preceding wines. Exceptionally substantial and lengthy for the vintage, it, too, should drink well through 2021 if not longer. Veteran winemaker Anna Matzinger appears to have maximized what nature provided in the warm 2009 vintage. She describes it as “a friendly vintage with lots of sunshine in the glass”. www.archerysummit.com