Belle Pente’s 2007 Pinot Noir Estate Reserve is as multidimensional as any wine I tasted from that estate this year, giving an impression of fresh, tart dark berry juice, salty beef bouillon, and mushroom stock, all infused with pungent dried herbs and smoky black tea. Relatively lightweight (at 12.9% alcohol) and fine-grained, its lean, lithe mid-palate impression and mouthwateringly juicy and saline finish are eminently satisfying and should prove enormously versatile at table. But given the degree to which its flavors show oxidative evolution, albeit positive; its relative leanness; as well as the showing both of other 2007s I tasted in June, I would be inclined to enjoy this over the next couple of years. An (as he puts it) “out of control” hobby winemaker, Brian O’Donnell and his wife Jill began planting their impressively-situated and manifestly impeccably manicured vineyard just east of Carlton (which I visited only briefly and not as part of my meeting with O’Donnel) in 1994, two years after a six month search that almost found them purchasing the Archery Summit home site. A significant share of fruit for Belle Pente wines still comes from other sources, Bella Vida and Murto vineyards being the most conspicuous, the latter subject to single-vineyard bottling since 1996. Pinot fermentation here is sometimes spontaneous, sometimes yeasted and follows up to 8 days of cold soak. The young wine typically goes without settling into barrels, only a modest percentage of which are new for any cuvee; and malo-lactic tends, in Burgundian fashion, to take place late. Wines – white or red – are typically not released until they have had well more than a year in bottle. The O’Donnells’ wines enjoy an enviable reputation so I am perplexed not to have found any of the (admittedly, limited) range of highly distinctive wines that I tasted in June more exciting (though the best, to be sure, were very good); and to have had significant reservations about two non-Pinots among them: a relatively dull, bifurcated 2008 Chardonnay and fusil, drying Riesling. I’ll be looking forward to honing or revising all of these impressions next year.Tel. (503) 852-9500