Sourced from all across their estate, and representing their largest bottling, the Momtazis' 2010 Pinot Noir Jamsheed offers a strawberry-rhubarb impression of at once lightly cooked and tart-edged fruit. A reductive note possibly accentuated by the use of screw cap closure (although these wines receive intentionally and often manifestly low-doses of sulfur) expresses itself as fried pork rind. A soft feel (which I in fact associate with low sulfur) leads to a finish that at once caresses and stimulates. I'd like to see more sheer length as well as more complexity here, though, especially considering that the 2009 (reviewed in issue 202) was exceptional. This is one to revisit next year.
This year, I visited the Momtazi family's vineyard (about which I wrote in my issue 202 coverage) during the completion of a facility that is as large as any aircraft-hanger I've ever seen, and in which the crush facility and future barrel cellar are practically swallowed-up. Constructed largely from massive trees that grew on the property, and lined inside with staves from hundreds if not a thousand or more old barrels that they have been saving-up, this flabbergasting building reflects Mo Momtazi's background in engineering and construction as well as the grandiosity and audacity of his vision. And if one considers the regard in which the fruit grown by this former Iranian refugee is held, his ambitions for Pinot Noir on this massive, windswept cluster of hills south of McMinnville do not seem to have been at all inflated. Half of the 500 acres at this site have been planted - some just recently. "We planted that last section in 2009," he relates, "but we had so much snow that the whole hillside slid and we lost all of the vines and had to start over. Nowadays everybody wants the Pinot from these steep slopes. I might plant just a few more acres in Chardonnay, because Tahmiene" - his daughter who has in recent years run the cellar - "really likes to have Chardonnay. But other than that, we're maxed-out." Due to some confusion about my visit and to the contemporaneous construction of this estate-s new facilities, I was regrettably unable on this occasion to taste most of the Maysara Pinot Noirs subsequent to those vintages on which I reported in issue 2002, and the Momtazis and I will have some serious catching-up to do next year.
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