The 2014 Pinot Noir Zenith Vineyard has an exuberant bouquet with red cherry and blueberry aromas, touches of vanilla and a little mint combining to positive effect. The palate is medium-bodied with firm tannin, a little more masculine than I was expecting with good backbone, moderate complexity; the fruit veers more towards black than red on the white pepper tinged finish. Give this a couple of years in bottle.

The 2013 Pinot Noir Zenith Vineyard was picked from 27 to 28 September. It has a perfumed bouquet with scents of red cherry, strawberry and potpourri that are not intense but well defined. The palate is medium-bodied and quite soft in the mouth. Not a complex Pinot Noir, but there is appreciable volume with good acidity, an almost citrus-like, quite spicy finish pops up on the finish. Not bad considering the growing season, though the lack of structure suggests it will drink best in the next 4-6 years.

The 2012 Pinot Noir Zenith Vineyard is apparently Mark Vlossak's favorite wine that he has ever made from the vineyard. It has a touch of patisserie infusing the red cherry and crushed strawberry-scented bouquet that is very generous, wilted violet petals joining the fray with aeration. The palate is medium-bodied with a soft entry, rounded in texture with red cherries and lush strawberry flavors and a caressing finish with a healthy dash of white pepper on the aftertaste.

Dried cherry and cranberry tinged with ginger, white pepper, clove and resin make for a penetrating and pungent nose to the St. Innocent 2011 Pinot Noir Zenith Vineyard. The tartness of its red berries and tactile impingement of its spicy elements make for a similarly audacious palate presentation, which an emerging aura of holly berry distillate only encourages. The gripping, invigorating finish retains a welcome measure of refreshing primary juiciness; and unlike a good many other St. Innocent (or Zenith Estate) Pinots, this seems simply to slough-off its (ca. 30%) share of new oak. I suspect it will merit attention through at least 2020. Founder-winemaker Mark Vlossak – for much more about whom, and about St. Innocent, consult my issue 202 report – compares 2011 with the low-alcohol, high-acid Pinots he bottled in 1999, but not by way of dwelling on similarities; on the contrary. “I basically told people not to drink them,” he says of his 1999s, “and I’m still not drinking them. Every time I open ‘em I just think they’re way too young. Some may just be starting to come ‘round. But 2011 is completely different. Back then a lot of the vineyard was dying of phylloxera. We still had wide spacing. Now we have younger vines but with much denser spacing and more leaves to do the job.” Vlossak notes that “the highest alcohol I got in 2011was 13%, and I didn’t chaptalize anything that came in over 12.5%. The largest sugar buy I had ever made until now was 50 pounds, which means that basically I’d never really chaptalized anything. And I bought around 1,700 pounds of sugar in 2011!” Fermentative extraction and pressing were both gentler than usual – and “usual’ here, Vlossak has repeatedly sought to assure me, signifies an already light touch. I found two Vlossak’s whites tasted ahead of his latest Pinot Noirs surprisingly glassy in texture and tart, especially considering the noticeable degree of alcoholic ripeness achieved in the 2012 Pinot Blanc. Tel. (503) 932 2129

From two of the earliest replanted parcels in this vineyard and Dijon clones 667 and 777, the St. Innocent 2010 Pinot Noir Zenith Vineyard offers juicy sour cherry laced with sage and brown spices, possessing fine-grained tannins, subtle suggestions of satin, and a sappy, vibrant persistence underlain by mouthwatering, saline, meat stock savor; in short, supplying dimensions missing from a couple of other Pinots in the present collection. This ought to be well worth following for at least a decade. Founder-winemaker Mark Vlossak – whose St. Innocent winery will soon celebrate its first quarter century – constructed a new facility on the grounds of Zenith vineyard in 2006 after he and vineyard proprietors Kari and Tim Ramey arranged a quid pro quo whereby St. Innocent owns shares in Zenith – from whose previous owner they had bought fruit for O’Connor Vineyard bottlings – who now supply a significant share of St. Innocent’s fruit; whilst Vlossak makes the Rameys’ Zenith wines. (My account of recent Zenith releases appears in the separate on-line report in this issue.) These developments took place against the background of St. Innocent losing access to the fruit of Seven Springs Vineyard (now under contract to Evening Land, as discussed in my coverage in this report of that two-state, multi-regional project), after having been that vineyard’s largest customer and their reputations having been closely linked since St. Innocent’s inception. Vlossak says he favors relatively large fermentation tanks whose mass encourages fermentation temperatures “above 80 degrees F. for five to seven days. I just think that gives a different, richer feel in the mouth that’s sort of the signature for what I do. My aim is to build that kind of fine structure, not to achieve bigness or super-ripeness.” He de-stems but nowadays is able to (and does) work with up to half whole berries. “I do inoculate” for fermentation, explains Vlossak, “but only a tiny pile of yeasts in one corner, and I almost never add SO2 (at that stage), so the idea is that I want the indigenous things to grow, and whoever wins (the race to efficacy) wins. I don’t punch-down a lot,” he continues, “and I never pump-over. I’m looking for a certain texture and I don’t worry about whether the wine has gone completely dry before putting into tank to settle for three or four days” and thence to barrels, of which usually 30-40% are new. Pressing is very gentle, cautious, and quantitatively inefficient. The 2010s are a very bright, generally tart bunch, all but one of which weight in at below 13% alcohol. Time, alas, always being limited, Vlossak only had me taste the 2009 Pinots from the couple of sites that were too cool to subject to single-vineyard bottlings in 2010, and the combination of that very ripe vintage with those sites and Vlossak’s approach was especially impressive, making me wish I’d had a chance to taste more of St Innocent’s 2009s. Tel. (503) 932 2129