The 2014 Pinot Noir Justice Vineyard offers attractive cranberry and raspberry fruit on the nose mixed with a subtle oyster shell note that becomes more noticeable as it opens in the glass. The palate is medium-bodied with supple tannin, nicely focused in the mouth with rosemary and bay leaf lending complexity towards the finish. This should give plenty of drinking pleasure over the next decade.

The 2013 Pinot Noir Justice Vineyard has an impressive, quite mineral driven bouquet with "airy" red berry fruit infused with cold stone scents. The palate is medium-bodied with fine tannin, mainly red berry fruit mixed with citrus fruit, a little foursquare perhaps, though it just misses some substance on the finish that cuts away more swiftly than its peers. Still, it should drink well for 5-7 years. Just 12 barrels produced.

The 2012 Pinot Noir Justice Vineyard comes from 777 clone in a wind-exposed elevation. Cropped at 2.4 tons per acre, it was picked October 9 and sees 16 months in French oak (one-third new). It has a very floral bouquet with well-defined Morello cherry, crushed strawberry and cassis-scented bouquet that overall is very feminine. The palate is medium-bodied with a supple texture and well-judged acidity. Quite harmonious in the mouth and exerting a gentle grip, the persistence is quite impressive, although it will need a year in bottle to fully express itself.

From a site planed entirely to Dijon Clone 777 and in which sedimentary soil is overlain with weathered volcanic soil, the St. Innocent 2011 Pinot Noir Justice Vineyard delivers sweaty and musky aromas along with distilled and fresh intimations of the tart-edged red raspberry that goes on to dominate on a firm palate. A hint of gum-numbing tannin introduced at least partly by barrel (ca. 25% new) can’t keep down the tightly-wound energy and brightness of fruit here, though the overall impression is strident. A promisingly savory suggestion of red meat juices emerges on the finish as this takes on air. I’d want to revisit this within a couple of years before attempting to assess its further bottle potential. 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 a breezy site that, unusually, features both marine sedimentary and rock-laced basalt-based soils, the St. Innocent 2010 Pinot Noir Justice Vineyard weighs in at a mere 12.7% alcohol. Fresh cherry complemented by almond paste and vanilla informs a silken yet persistently vivacious palate, leading to a long, vibrant finish in which toasty nut oils, black tea, and savory, saline, marrow-rich beef stock offer striking counterpoint to the bright, spicy cast that otherwise informs this bottling. I suspect this will be well worth following for ten or a dozen years. At only 271 cases, incidentally, this fell even further short of normal production in 2010 than the other vineyards from which St. Innocent sources. 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