The 450 cases of Shea Cellars 2010 Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard Homer involve four blocks, only one of which (#31) also spawned a single-block bottling this vintage, feature all three of the vineyard’s dominant selections or clones. “We look for our best barrels here,” explains Shea, “but now that we’ve been doing this (bottling) for ten years, we’re discovered that the flavor profile we want and what we’re trying to do with it seems mostly to come from the same blocks in the vineyard every year” – all, incidentally, on the upper-elevation west side, and dominated in aggregate by Wadenswil – “so now we sort of have in mind in advance what’s going into ‘Homer.’” Mint, bay laurel, smoky nut oils, and violet fascinatingly accent the ripe dark berries in this alluringly scented and polished, expansive, palpably extract-rich as well as downright energetic Pinot that easily (i.e. almost undetectably) digests its diet of 80% new oak. Billowing inner-mouth perfume; richness and concentrated fruit without heaviness; and an exhilarating ping to the long, mouthwatering finish all make for a memorable experience that should be deliciously replicable over at least the next 12-15 years.
After a decade spent planting and establishing the reputation for their today 200-acre vineyard – located west of Newberg, near to where the current A.V.A.s of Chehalem Mountain, Ribbon Ridge, Yamhill-Carlton, and Dundee Hills all come to within two miles of touching one another – in 1996, New Yorkers Dick and Deirdre Shea decided to take up year-round Oregon residence and began estate-bottling some of their fruit, relying on support from local enological luminaries, including Ken Wright and Patricia Green, before officially hiring a dedicated winemaker in 2003. Their share of fruit today stands at 25%, with the other three-quarters going to one of the largest – and certainly among the most prestigious – lists of winery clients (in California as well as Oregon) for any vineyard in the U.S. Shea was hit hard in the 1990s by phylloxera, so that the first estate wines coincided with a period of intensive, strategic replanting and grafting. (“Compared with that,” relates Shea, “planting the first time was easy. We just stuck sticks in the ground and walked away, using watering cans on occasion.” And look what quality they got!) Now that the vines planted in that era have begun to reach maturity, there was no winemaker I talked to – whether or not a Shea client – who did not seem to believe that one of the handful of best vineyards in the Willamette Valley has become a yet better source of fruit during the past decade than it had been before. Given the opportunity to cherry-pick their own vineyard, Dick Shea says that “basically we want a little bit of Pommard, some Wadenswil, some Dijon 777,” because the mix is still dominated by Pommard and Wadenswil, or as he put it, by “what came up in the back of a pick-up truck from California to plant the vineyard originally,” with the share of Dijon clones other than 777 being minimal. Since, with few exceptions, the Shea blocks are mono-clonal, it might be suspected or argued that both the estate’s multiple single-block bottlings (this year averaging 250 cases each) and the Shea Vineyard bottlings of those many clients who contract only for blocks or portions of blocks to bottle as “Shea Vineyard,” might sacrifice something in potential complexity. But I found the estate wines to be as good as and in many instances better than the many Shea Vineyard releases I tasted from other wineries, and they confirm the impression I share with Sheas that fruits of Pommard or Wadenswil selections are more than capable of delivering self-sufficient complexity. Drew Voit was responsible for the 2010s – which were, as usual here, bottled already in August following the harvest – as well as for the 2008 and 2009s I tasted, though I did not have chance to discuss them with him. Five weeks before my visit, Voigt had passed the reins to Ne
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