While the Momtazis intended their young vines “Three Degrees” cuvee to be a bargain, it is their 10,000 case bottling 2009 Pinot Noir Jamsheed – sourced from all portions and vine selections of their vineyard – that proves to be the more amazing value. Fresh boysenberry and purple plum are garlanded with bitter-sweet flowers; tinged with brown spices; underlain with clean red meatiness; and suffused with saliva-liberating salinity in a Pinot of refined tannins and outstanding persistence. Savor this over the next 3-4 years.
In 1998, on a huge, hilly, windswept and abandoned wheat farm south of McMinnville, Mo Momtazi – an engineer who had fled his native Iran for the U.S. in the early ‘80s – began planting and biodynamically farming Pinot Noir. His fruit – a portion of it from the beginning estate-bottled – quickly attracted a certain reputation for incipiently complex flavor intensity, even if here was a place – at least, in the vineyard’s upper elevations – where Pinot would struggle to ripen. Fortunately, over large parts of Momtazi Vineyard’s surface the heat-retention of basalt rock and veins of silica moderates the characteristically very cool evening air temperatures. I had already sensed from tasting several Momtazi wines a other addresses that this is fruit with a special appeal for the most serious not to say fanatical of vintners, and the number of people purchasing these grapes is diminishing by intention because, as Momtazi put it, “If I am going to go broke growing Pinot, I might as well stay home and be broke.” Momtazi’s daughter Tahmiene took over the cellar in 2007. Her two sisters are also involved with the family winery. Pinot is always destemmed; fermentative extraction is by means of pigeage, pump-over and pulsed-air, but regardless of method, sparing; and the young wines go to barrel at dryness without any settling. Another distinctive aspect of Maysara elevage is that some of these young Pinots I tasted had been racked twice, presumably on account of the reduction that can be courted by going to barrel “dirty.” I must say I came away from my first tasting with the Momtazis not at all clear as to the principles that determine and are taken to justify so many different estate Pinots. Moreover – as even a superficial review of my ratings makes clear – I had difficulty making sense of this estate’s pricing hierarchy in terms of wine quality, since ostensibly lesser cuvees can be as complex and better balanced than some that are expensive.
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