Intimations of tart cherry and cranberry mingle with black tea; vintage-typical piquancy of citrus oils; as well as with smoky, toasty, caramelized notes from barrels (though only 20% were new) in the nose of St. Innocent’s 2011 Pinot Noir Temperance Hill Vineyard. There are welcome clarity and sap here, and the tannins conduce to an athletic sense of leanness allied to energy. The smoky themes are stubbornly persistent but so too, fortunately, is the sense of primary juiciness. Lightly sweaty, gamey notes emerged as this opened to the air. I’d give it at most two years before revisiting, but tentatively anticipate its being worth following through at least 2017.
Founder-winemaker Mark Vlossak – for much more about whom, and about St. Innocent, consult my issue 202 report – compares 2011 with the low-alcohol, high-acid Pinots he bottled in 1999, but not by way of dwelling on similarities; on the contrary. “I basically told people not to drink them,” he says of his 1999s, “and I’m still not drinking them. Every time I open ‘em I just think they’re way too young. Some may just be starting to come ‘round. But 2011 is completely different. Back then a lot of the vineyard was dying of phylloxera. We still had wide spacing. Now we have younger vines but with much denser spacing and more leaves to do the job.” Vlossak notes that “the highest alcohol I got in 2011was 13%, and I didn’t chaptalize anything that came in over 12.5%. The largest sugar buy I had ever made until now was 50 pounds, which means that basically I’d never really chaptalized anything. And I bought around 1,700 pounds of sugar in 2011!” Fermentative extraction and pressing were both gentler than usual – and “usual’ here, Vlossak has repeatedly sought to assure me, signifies an already light touch. I found two Vlossak’s whites tasted ahead of his latest Pinot Noirs surprisingly glassy in texture and tart, especially considering the noticeable degree of alcoholic ripeness achieved in the 2012 Pinot Blanc.
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