Trisaetum’s 2011 Pinot Noir Ribbon Ridge Estate marries deeply savory roasted red meat juices with brightly-fresh plum and sour cherry. There is a significant overlay of tannin including from barrel, but fortunately the retention of primary juiciness and savory carnal as well as saline mineral elements that jump-start the salivary glands help one overlook any roughness. I would anticipate improvement and high performance through at least 2018.
James Frey’s Tristaetum – whose highly-sophisticated Ribbon Ridge facility (including an “air knife” on their extra-wide sorting belt for instantly removing water, not to mention bugs) will now host Louis Jadot’s new project with Resonance Vineyard – continues, entering their seventh vintage in 2013, to display considerable promise with both Pinot and Riesling, now from three distinctive sites, since the diminutive Wichmann Vineyard in Dundee (next to Archery Summit’s Red Hills Estate) has now joined their Ribbon Ridge and Coast Range estate vineyards. (The latter is dramatically-situated in an extreme southwestern appendage of the Yamhill-Carlton A.V.A, whose borders were reputedly drawn so as not to exclude such a promising slope. For more on Frey’s sites and methodology, consult my introduction to this winery in issue 202.) Surprisingly given vintage norms, Frey claims not to have needed to drop significant Pinot crop from his Ribbon Ridge vineyard in 2011 and to still have come in under two tons per acre. (His other two vineyards regularly produce slightly more.) “We had big bunches,” relates co-winemaker Greg McClellan, “but there wasn’t much consistency, and there weren’t overly many of them.” The 2011 Pinot harvest was finished on November 2, eight days before the ten of Riesling-picking even began, because – much as in 2010 – while must weights were already high enough in early November, pHs remained extremely low and malic acid was stubbornly persistent. Despite that chemistry, Riesling was once again bottled already in February. Frey and McClellan claim to have had more than 80 different fermenting lots from 50 tons of 2011 Riesling alone (in tanks, casks, and even one concrete egg), which suggests abundant data-points and opportunities to experiment with and improve their regimen of fermentation and elevage. The promisingly straggly and small-berried bunches I saw on their vines this year, as well as what they oxymoronically describe as their “retentive” scrupulousness in sorting, should also help advance quality going forward. No stems were retained in 2011 for the Pinot ferments, and those musts were at most minimally chaptalized, with bottled wines hovering around 12.5% alcohol.
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