Wine Blogging Wednesday #29 - Drinking the 2004 Lachini Ana Vineyard Pinot Noir
This post represents my first Wine Blogging Wednesday entry. Enjoy!
For this particular WBW event, I chose to review a bottle of 2004 Lachini Ana Vineyard Pinot Noir. Here’s a photo of the front label:
Here’s a photo of the back label:
I bought the bottle late last year at Whole Foods after visiting the Lachini winery the day after Thanksgiving. I have written a lengthy profile of Lachini before, so I will focus on the specifics related to this particular wine in this post.
I chose Lachini in part because they fit the profile for WBW #29: biodynamic wine. Lachini is a LIVE-certified winery, which means they adhere to certain sustainable growing and harvesting practices. The LIVE certification effort is characteristically Oregonian in that it is voluntary, intelligent, and fairly popular. Over 100 wines are certified as sustainably farmed and bottled based on the LIVE certification methodology.
But hey, LIVE certification is only worthwhile if the resulting wines are good, right? So what about this wine?
The 2004 Lachini Ana Vineyard Pinot Noir contains 100% Pommard Pinot Noir from relatively old vines (26 years old at the time the grapes were picked for this wine). The wine clocks in at 14.4% alcohol, or 1% “stronger” than the 2005 vintage. There are only 260 cases of the 2005 bottling and I think the 2004 is equally scarce, although the Lachini Web site contains no data on the subject.
The Ana Vineyard itself is quite an interesting site within the region of Oregon wine country. Perhaps the Beaux Frères winery Web site says it best:
“Established in 1976, the Ana vineyard is one of the last remaining own-rooted plantings in the Red Hills. At 435 ft this Jory soil site is bordered by the Arcus, Weber and Goldschmidt Vineyards. Planted with the Pommard clone, and trained using the double-guyot method this vineyard is meticulously farmed by owner Andy Humphrey” (reprinted from 2002 vintage information at Beaux Frères’ Web site).
Ana Vineyard also provides the Pommard grapes for a few other high-end Oregon Pinot Noir wineries. This vineyard does have its own winery, producing 100% single-vineyard Pinot Noir, but I cannot locate a functional Web site for that winery. At least the Lachini Web site provides a few more details about this storied Oregon vineyard, although they claim the Ana Vineyard is the same as the Weber Vineyard. I think they’ve got it right since their information is more current than the other sources I’ve found online.
Back to the wine. I tried it with some fresh grilled tri-tip beef, freshly baked and crusty whole wheat sourdough bread, and a salad of baby Romaine lettuce without dressing. All in all, a good (if a bit bland) Pinot Noir meal:
- Appearance: It’s worth mentioning the way this wine looks in the glass. The color is very deep red, almost inky in texture. A great start!
- Aroma: At opening, an incredibly deep bouquet of bramble and hay, pencil lead, black and red cherry, and a barnyard/forest floor combination. After the wine opened up for a while, the bouquet settled into a combination of ripe cherries and a woody mushroom essence in nearly equal measure, plus a secondary scent of hay. Very interesting and complex, and varietally correct for the Pommard clone (from what I understand about that clone).
- Flavor: This wine needed time to open up in the glass; ultimately, the flavor was a delicious balance of black cherry, red cherry, black plum, and an earthy smoky spice that seemed most like black pepper but that might have been something more festive, such as a very light nutmeg or cinnamon overtone. Lovely, well-integrated tannins are present after 1-2 hours of decanting or glass swirling, as the case may be. I didn’t taste the overwhelming mushroom flavors that are present in the very young 2005, though there was a hint of morel mushroom on the tongue. Well balanced and tasty.
- Purity of Fruit: A special category since this is a biodynamic wine. I’d say the focus and concentation of fruit flavors is significant, but whether the fruit flavors in this wine are more “pure” than another Pinot Noir is hard to say. Then again, I don’t think this wine is expressly “biodynamic” by some definitions, but it’s certainly farmed sustainably and responsibly. Anyway, as I said the fruit flavors in this wine are quite delicious, with very focused cherry and plum flavors in particular.
- General impression: A wonderful wine! The combination of sweet, sour, and spicy at first, a velvet-soft midpalate, and a mild smoky aftertaste was excellent. There is something very alluring about the massively earthy, almost musky bouquet of this wine. I want more.
I paid $43.99 plus tax for this wine. Was it worth it? Good question: You can buy 2 or possibly 3 decent Pinot Noirs for that much money. However, I think this wine is definitely worth the money, in part because 100% old vines Pommard Pinot Noir from Oregon is a fairly rare wine to discover. Mostly, though, I like all of the Lachini wines and I like their desire to produce single-varietal, single-vineyard releases rather than blending all of their grapes into other wines. I also like the Lachini commitment to salmon-safe, ecologically sound viticultural practices. Finally, the people who run Lachini are wonderful and certainly deserving of my humble patronage (holding steady at 2 bottles per year).
One final note: I am using my recently purchased WineKeeper “Keeper” to preserve this wine in my fridge. So far this system has done a good job of preserving the delicacy of a good Pinot Noir bouquet. This system seems to work best if you only pour wine a few times rather than taking many small sips, so to speak.
And with that, I thank you for reading my first Wine Blogging Wednesday post! I look forward to next month, when I hear the topic will be “$16,000 Wines.” I hope somebody sends me a free sample.
POSTSCRIPT: 24 hours after I opened this bottle, and after using my WineKeeper “Keeper” to preserve the wine inside, I still love this wine. The Keeper retains the initial aromas and flavors that are present at first pour, which means you can have that freshly-opened bottle experience at least one or two more times with the same bottle of Pinot Noir. Now that’s cool! And six days later, the wine still tasted great. I finished it on Sunday after opening it on Monday (and pouring some more on Tuesday). Delicious.