Cinnamon and fresh ginger, sassafras, lemon oil and smoky black tea pungently and invigoratingly accent cherry in the nose infectiously juicy palate of Evesham Wood’s 2011 Pinot Noir Le Puits Sec, which as usual incorporates most of the estate’s Pommard vines. There is textural polish here that was missing from this year’s two less-expensive Pinot bottlings, and a vibrant ping and ringing persistence of fruit and spice, with dark shadings of burley tobacco and humus adding further to the complexity adumbrated on the nose. Look for delicious versatility and continued vivacity from this fine value through at least 2020. Erin Nuccio – for more about whose 2010 acquisition of Evesham Wood from Russ Raney, as well as about the latter’s style and vineyard sources, consult my Issue 202 report – is finding his footing and increasingly setting his mark on the wines at this venerable address. That said, the delicacy of touch both in the cellar and eventually on your palate , the sense of elegant dynamic, and the very restrained use of new wood – as well as Raney’s signature yeast culture, spawned many years ago from a spent bottle of Henri Jayer Pinot – still characterize Evesham Wood Pinots. Nuccio hasn’t done anything to improve on this winery’s pricing – or, to be more precise, on his own bottom line – because they are almost ludicrously underpriced, making these consistently among the finest wine values anywhere in the U.S. much less the Willamette Valley. Too bad that – as Nuccio and Raney suspected already before the estate changed hands – some of its old vines are now cursed with phylloxera. There is no Temperance Hill Pinot this year, and it would be sad if that historic not to mention synergistic association with Evesham Wood were to go the way of Seven Springs, which was this estate’s other primary outside source of fruit until the purchase of that vineyard for Evening Land. But it appears that there’s no turning back the phylloxera in Evesham Wood’s traditional block at Temperance Hill either. Tel. (503) 371-8478