Corn shoots and green apple dominate the nose and subtly silken yet animating and juicy palate of Elk Cove’s 2010 Pinot Blanc – their seventh bottling of that variety – whose fruit comes from three of their estate vineyards. Four grams of residual sugar help round off a still exuberantly juicy and not too green apple-y, tart finish. I suspect this will continue to give pleasure for 2-3 years. (There are just shy of a thousand cases.)
Based in Gaston near the northern edge of the Willamette Valley, Elk Cove was founded by Pat and Joe Campbell, whose son Adam (though he looks too young today to have done so) took over in 1995. There are 250 acres of vines, including six sites subjected to dedicated bottlings. Nearly half of the vines, surprisingly, are white. Pinot is not always entirely de-stemmed; typically but not always ferments spontaneously; and is bottled (with the exception of the entry-level cuvee) at around 16 months. While the percentage of new wood employed is analytically modest, there was an extraneously caramelized sense to a couple of the Pinots I tasted. I did not have time to taste nearly the entire range of current wines – on whose labels, incidentally, no names of sub-A.V.A.s appear; rather only “Willamette Valley.”
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