Assembled over an eight week period during the summer after harvest, and incorporating a majority of the 85-100 individual lots of Pinot that she says are annually typical in her cellar, Penner-Ash’s 2010 Pinot Noir – like most such intro-level offerings from prominent Willamette wineries – essentially represents a compilation of the many barrels that weren’t selected for single-vineyard, prestige, or sub-appellation bottlings. The result involves around 25-30% new wood. This is a very clean, texturally rather spare offering, dominated by a, for its vintage, surprisingly cooked rather than fresh sense of dark berries. Faint warmth and bitterness creeps into what is nonetheless a successfully persistent finish. I would plan to enjoy this within the next 2-3 years. (While hardly without merit, the 2002 tasted alongside was beginning to turn drying and brittle, exhibiting as much character of autumnal leaves as berry fruit.)
Lynn Penner-Ash – who with her husband Ron runs the eponymous winery – designed her recently-constructed Yamhill-Carlton facility (surrounded by the estate’s 15 acre Dussin vineyard) with evident insight and enthusiasm drawn from the same quarter century of technical and practical experience as well as aesthetic sensibility that have made her wines regional icons. Interestingly, Penner-Ash did not include a bottling line in her plans, insisting that the multiple trucks, detail-consciousness, and self-sufficiency that characterize today’s top mobile bottling companies argue in favor of farming-out that finishing touch to those specialists. Penner-Ash taps six principle sites for Pinot (resulting in 5-7 separate bottles); three each for Syrah and Viognier; plus one for Riesling. Her fermentative regimen for Pinot involves 5-7 days of cold soak; a division of lots between spontaneity and inoculation; hand punch-downs as the primary means of extraction; pressing at dryness; and an unusually long settling period of up to a week before juice is let into barrel. Whole clusters and stems are utilized for certain single-vineyard lots in certain vintages (including 2010). This estate bottles certain of their Pinots (but not ones I tasted in their 2010 editions) under the Willamette Valley’s sub-appellations, but their single-vineyard wines are all labeled solely with the Willamette Valley appellation, so I have noted in the text of each applicable tasting note the sub-region in which the vines are located. Penner-Ash is among many Willamette vintners to maintain that what she termed “proactive” and judicious acidulation of musts – based on an analysis of malic acid levels and experience with the fermentative and bottle evolution of Pinot from each individual vineyards – was among the keys to vintage 2010 success.
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