The 2014 Pinot Noir Ribbon Springs Vineyard has a pale ruby color and nose of red currants, pomegranate and potpourri with underlying dusty earth and garrigue hints. Medium-bodied with a great structure of fine-grained tannins and lively acid, it has intense red berry and earth flavor layers, finishing long with some mineral hints.

The 2013 Pinot Noir Ribbon Springs Vineyard, matured for ten months in 30% new French oak, has a slightly smudged bouquet of blackberry and raspberry fruit with just a slight tinniness coming through with aeration. The palate is crisp on the entry, light tannin here, quite "airy" though not ephemeral in any way, segueing into a bright citrus-tinged finish that is just missing a little persistence. Still, this will drink nicely over the next 5-7 years.

The 2012 Ribbon Springs Vineyard Pinot Noir comes from estate fruit on sedimentary soils and sees 29% new oak. It has a perfumed bouquet with boysenberry and raspberry fruit, all well defined with touches of orange blossom. The palate is quite structured on the entry, although it is not masculine, rather solid and perhaps you could say "big boned." It is fresh and nicely poised with a touch of bitter cherry toward the finish. I would afford this a couple of years in bottle to allow those tannins to soften.

Black tea and smokiness segue into fine-grained tannins in the tartly berry-flavored Adelsheim 2011 Pinot Noir Ribbon Springs Vineyard. “Earlier in my career, I could not have made a wine like this,” Page confesses. “I would have been afraid of the seed tannins here and I would have made a tutti-frutti, lighter bodied wine.” That trust involves what I have come to hypothesize is a critical aspect to taming Ribbon Ridge tannin, namely post-fermentative skin contact – “just two to three days,” opines Paige, “but it’s a critical two or three.” Juicy, red berries and pomegranate are accented with smoky black tea and piquant fruit pit on a firm but fine-grained palate, leading to a finish of mouthwatering savor, seed-crunching invigoration, and impressive sheer length. Incidentally, like the corresponding Bryan Creek bottling and unlike other Adelsheim Pinots, this is dominated by vines of Pommard selection. I would plan to follow it through at least 2018. Adelsheim winemaker David Paige maintains, “I instantly became a better winemaker when I finally let go of worrying about why it is that grapes from one site taste so different from those harvested elsewhere and focused instead on making the best wine out of them.” The occasion for his remark was a comparison of adjacent Quarter Mile Lane and Bryan Creek Vineyards, which were planted from the same Adelsheim mother block on soils and with exposures identical as nearly as their proprietor and his team let alone yours truly can tell. “Sure, we handle the fruit a bit differently now,” notes Paige, “but that’s in response to the differences we observe right off the vine.” Paige insists, though, that he is anything but a recipe winemaker even relative to a given vineyard or block. “I drive some of the people who work with me crazy I do so much tasting in the cellar, because what I suggest we do with this particular fermentor based on how it’s tasting today might be 180 degrees removed from what I thought we were going to want to do a day or two ago. But now I have more data.” (For a capsule history of this estate and details on its nowadays extensive vineyards, consult my issue 202 report.) Tel. (503) 538-3652

Red raspberry and tart dried cherry and cranberry are tinged with piquancy and crunch of pit and seed in the invigorating if slightly rambunctiously tart and tannic Adelsheim 2010 Pinot Noir Ribbon Springs Vineyard. A suggestion of salted meat juices serves for welcome savor in a finish of undeniable vibrancy and grip, if also considerable bitterness. There is a handsome leanness not to mention energy here that bodes well for at least the better part of a decade’s aging. Paige notes that Ribbon Springs is their warmest, driest and first-picked site. Oregon pioneer David Adelsheim – who planted his original vineyard on Quarter Mile Lane in the Chehalem foothills north of Newberg in 1972 – hired Davis-trained David Paige in 2001, and the latter has been winemaker here since. Extensive new facilities were added to the 1993 Calkins Lane winery in 2008 to better accommodate what – thanks to an expansion of vineyards beginning in 1989, facilitated and accelerated by a partnership with Lynn and Jack Loackera begun in 1994 – has grown to 190 acres representing 11 different vineyard sites farmed by the Adelsheim team across the northern fringe of the Willamette Valley. (There are often nearly 200 different fermentations going on here in a vintage.) Fruit farmed by others – which constitutes at most 25% of total production – tends to be taken from sites that Adelsheim and Paige consider especially exciting and that complement their own vineyards geographically and stylistically, such as that from Temperance Hill or Zenith, both in the relatively distant and distinctly different Eola-Amity Hills. Pinot is nearly always destemmed; typically receives 4-6 days cold soak; is usually inoculated; occupies mostly small fermentors with cautious extraction via punch-down and occasionally pulse-air; with the young wine pressed before or after complete dryness depending on lot, and settled to remove all but the finest residue of lees before going to barrels, of which seldom more than 25% are new, and from which the wine is removed for bottling after only 9-10 months. Paige opines that “If you don’t got for much extraction or a lot of new oak character, we find the wines come around and make plenty of sense by the summer.” Chaptalization his been relatively infrequent in recent years, Paige suggests, and then only in small increments; whether to acidify is judged lot by lot “but we’ve done it somewhere in pretty much every vintage. We do get high natural acidity, but a lot of it is malic, especially in years like 2010.” At their best, understatement, firm structure, and brightness have, in my experience, counted among the virtues of Adelsheim wines, but I have to say that I would have welcomed a bit more emphatic and supple performance than that delivered by the majority of those I tasted on the occasion of my June visit, especially considering their prices. Adelsheim’s numerous single-vineyard Pinots are rendered in less (sometimes much less) than 300-case volumes and most are sold directly from the winery.Tel. (503) 538-3652