From around 10-12% estate fruit; 40% from Shea Vineyard; and the rest from Cherry Grove, Antica Terra’s 2008 Pinot Noir Botanica mingles toasted almond and pecan with ripe cherry and black raspberry shadowed by their distilled essences but happily free of superficial sweetness. Polished and expansive, this finishes with enough brown spice and fruit pit accents to hold one’s interest, and a persistence of juicy, primary fruit guaranteed to call forth the next sip. It should be worth following for at least the next 6-8 years.
Devoid of experience as she tells it, Maggie Harrison “l(fā)anded the holy grail of winemaking apprenticeships” with Manfred Krankl at his Sine Qua Non, which resulted in her becoming his right arm for almost a half dozen years, along the way launching in 2004 her own small label for Syrah. A year later, three friends scouting for Willamette property in which to invest asked Krankl to become their winemaker. He declined, advising them to ask Harrison instead. She declined, but then agreed to at least look at the 11-acre Eola-Amity Hills property they had chosen. The vines were tragically unkempt, and when shown those of twenty years’ age, Harrison recounts, “I pulled the old owner aside and said ‘you’ve got to tell me the truth!’ because I thought there was no way that vines that old could look so spindly and infantile; and there weren’t any signs or end posts or map of what was planted where.” This retarded growth was in fact among the clues to the site’s unique potential: a conspicuously fossiliferous rocky prominence, wind-exposed even by local Van Duzer Corridor standards, it turned out – after dozens of soil pits were dug – that this terra was more antique than even expert geologists, let alone those who named it, could have imagined. But it took traumatic ripping down each row right through the rock and the vines’ frail roots to even begin unleashing that potential. (The by-product: 3,700 tons of stone discard. Ampelographic assistance supplemented by genetic testing eventually yielded a vine map.) Baptism by rain followed during the 2007 harvest, bringing what for Harrison was a new revelation. “I went out into the vineyard with an umbrella and cried, thinking I’d made a terrible mistake leaving California.” But what she learned from the experience is that in the Willamette rain happens, yet even a lot of it – if the grower is granted a narrow window, not to mention given the breezes and tiny berries on her hillside plus fanatic sorting – wine of distinction can result. Contract fruit will continue indefinitely to inform a significant share of Antica Terra’s production, but the estate volume – first subjected to solo bottling in vintage 2009 – will gradually increase. Five supplemental acres of Pinot were planted in 2008, and at the time of my visit – after several years studded with trips to far-flung vineyards, experiencing what their growers accomplished with often obscure white cepages under, to some extent, similar geological and climatic conditions – the team had elected to nail to their masthead ... Godello! Assistant winemaker Nathaniel (Nate) Ready – whom Harrison insisted show me her finished wines, while she showed me her vineyard and the impressive raw materials of 2011 from barrel – is a (master) sommelier whose defection from that career track appears to have come about solely for the sake of Antica Terra. In addition to this project’s ability and willingness to pursue labor-intensive biodynamic cultivation and make long-term investments in the health of its estate’s soils (assisted by reputedly crack local consultant Jessica Cortell), no expense has evidently been spared in applying the utmost rigor to selection of fruit and – to whatever degree deemed necessary – declassification of wine; nor on whatever equipment (albeit housed in a drab former warehouse in Dundee) is though most conducive to gentle handling of fruit and small fermentation batches; nor on startling and sumptuously-p
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