Incorporating the bulk of Evesham Wood’s estate vines, a 2010 Pinot Noir Le Puits Sec offers scents of smoked meats, leather, smoky black tea, sage and fresh dark berries. More palpably extract-rich and firmer than the corresponding La Grive Bleue bottling, it may like the other ostensibly top wines of its collection be suffering significantly from having been bottled only ten days before I tasted. But there are impressive sappy cling and mouthwatering salinity to the finish here, and while I don’t sense that this wine is principally about fruits and berries, a stronger sense of fruit will probably emerge after recovery from bottling.
In July, 2010, after 24 years building his estate’s reputation, founder Russ Raney sold Evesham Wood and its attendant Le Puits Sec vineyard to his assistant of several years, Erin Nuccio, a plan the latter says he initially rejected but that grew on him in the course of a year’s cogitation. Inspired by time spent in the 1990s working for DC-area retailer Ann Bertha, Nuccio had gone on to briefly acquire some winemaking skills in Northern California while his wife pursued her career in veterinary medicine, but ultimately (“after a spell of rain in Berkeley as bad as any in northern Oregon,” he jokes) he convinced her that as no other place would enable his dream, they should move to the (as she envisioned it) notoriously well-watered Willamette Valley. “Retiring early,” as Raney puts it, signals a confidence in Nuccio that – on the evidence of my recent conversations and tasting – seems entirely well-placed. There will naturally be changes – including, for starters, a bit more barrel rotation and a move toward spontaneous fermentation (whereas Raney had always sworn by a yeast strain he succeeded in culturing from a bottle of one of Henri Jayer’s 1985s!) – but the understated, typically bright, finely-etched and always unabashedly Burgundy-inspired style that Raney so successfully cultivated is clearly in no danger of dying out at his former address. Nuccio said that already (this was June!) fellow winemakers were calling and teasing him about an allegedly impending harvest: “ ‘So, are you going to pick early like Russ did?’ they ask me, and I say ‘No, I’m going to pick on time like Russ did’!” (Nuncio’s existing label, Haden Fig – profiled in the on-line supplement to this report – will continue in a distinctive style.)
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