Originating in Methven, Pelos Sandberg, Meredith Mitchell, and Windhill Vineyards, the Eieio 2009 Pinot Noir E – in keeping with what is becoming clear are McDonald’s stylistic proclivities – is surprisingly buoyant and tartly juicy for its vintage, featuring red currant and Ranier cherry mingled with bittersweet liquid floral perfume, pungent raw ginger and citrus oils. Finishing with penetration, invigoration and brash, sappy persistence, this isn’t the most complex or refined Pinot but is nonetheless striking and almost certainly worth following for at least 6-8 more years. There were nearly 1,200 cases, making it one of the winery’s few large lots.
Raised in the Texas Gulf Coast and Japan (acquired his accent – which he says varies with glasses consumed – from the former) Jay McDonald ditched a Manhattan job in finance close to two decades ago after a visit to Oregon and inspiration and encouragement from Cameron’s John Paul and others convinced him that here was a place happy to accept an eager and intelligent newbie to the wine business and seeking an internship. In the course of nearly 15 years, McDonald has slowly ramped-up production of his initially tiny negociant project, and he recently purchased property in the high foothills of the Coastal Range near the western limit of the Yamhill-Carlton A.V.A. where he plans to plant his own vineyard and build his own facility. Among his nearest neighbors – and already an important supplier – would then be the, in places, impressively steep and everywhere impeccably-groomed Yates Conwill Vineyard, whose affable owner-manager Steve Conwill takes as his motto: “to grow where no man has grown before” (though he’s the first to point out that his immediate neighbor in this still relatively rugged, undeveloped fringe of Yamhill-Carlton is the quite well-known Resonance Vineyard). To say that McDonald’s graphically striking labeling is not self-explanatory would be an understatement. He generally sorts and refers to his levels of productions as “E” (his largest) and “I” or “O” for smaller and progressively more expensive lots usually sold only through his direct mailing list. (There is sometimes also a cuvee “Y” – for Yamhill-Carlton, though it could as easily do service for Yates Conwill or, for that matter, Yummy, and MacDonald sent me a whole litany of adjectives “E,” “I,” and “O” could be said to stand for!) McDonald hasn’t felt it necessary to chaptalize any of his wines, though he did acidulate his 2009s. Fermentation is sometimes spontaneous, sometimes induced. “I’m cutting down on punch-downs,” he relates “as I think there’s been a general tendency to do too much. A low-pressure, high-volume pump-over is sometimes better.” After it reaches or nears dryness and is drained or pressed, the wine is usually settled for a week but, sometimes significantly longer. McDonald’s Pinots are generally bottled after 11 months. He sells his EIEIO wines inter alia from a picturesque former bank in tiny downtown Carlton, replete with livestock-related artwork (in case you don’t get it: “Old McDonald ...” : I didn’t!). McDonald’s shop – which in fact predates his negociant label by two years – is also an excellent source for well-selected, well-stored bottles of often hard-to-find wines from other small wineries.
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