Medium ruby, the 2016 Pinot Noir le Puits Sec has a nose of charcuterie, tar, dried flowers, saline and peppercorn with a core of warm blackberries, red and black cherries and blueberry hints. The palate is medium-bodied, silky and savory with a chalky frame and good freshness, finishing long and nuanced. This will benefit from another year in bottle. 475 cases produced.

The 2012 Pinot Noir le Puits Sec has a bold and upfront bouquet with a mixture of red and black fruit entwined with chalky scents that emerge with aeration. The palate is medium-bodied with quite intense kirsch and red plum notes mixed with touches of brown sugar toward the finish. It flirts with being a little cloying, but just pulls back in time.

Cinnamon and fresh ginger, sassafras, lemon oil and smoky black tea pungently and invigoratingly accent cherry in the nose infectiously juicy palate of Evesham Wood’s 2011 Pinot Noir Le Puits Sec, which as usual incorporates most of the estate’s Pommard vines. There is textural polish here that was missing from this year’s two less-expensive Pinot bottlings, and a vibrant ping and ringing persistence of fruit and spice, with dark shadings of burley tobacco and humus adding further to the complexity adumbrated on the nose. Look for delicious versatility and continued vivacity from this fine value through at least 2020. Erin Nuccio – for more about whose 2010 acquisition of Evesham Wood from Russ Raney, as well as about the latter’s style and vineyard sources, consult my Issue 202 report – is finding his footing and increasingly setting his mark on the wines at this venerable address. That said, the delicacy of touch both in the cellar and eventually on your palate , the sense of elegant dynamic, and the very restrained use of new wood – as well as Raney’s signature yeast culture, spawned many years ago from a spent bottle of Henri Jayer Pinot – still characterize Evesham Wood Pinots. Nuccio hasn’t done anything to improve on this winery’s pricing – or, to be more precise, on his own bottom line – because they are almost ludicrously underpriced, making these consistently among the finest wine values anywhere in the U.S. much less the Willamette Valley. Too bad that – as Nuccio and Raney suspected already before the estate changed hands – some of its old vines are now cursed with phylloxera. There is no Temperance Hill Pinot this year, and it would be sad if that historic not to mention synergistic association with Evesham Wood were to go the way of Seven Springs, which was this estate’s other primary outside source of fruit until the purchase of that vineyard for Evening Land. But it appears that there’s no turning back the phylloxera in Evesham Wood’s traditional block at Temperance Hill either. Tel. (503) 371-8478

Incorporating the bulk of Evesham Wood’s estate vines, a 2010 Pinot Noir Le Puits Sec offers scents of smoked meats, leather, smoky black tea, sage and fresh dark berries. More palpably extract-rich and firmer than the corresponding La Grive Bleue bottling, it may like the other ostensibly top wines of its collection be suffering significantly from having been bottled only ten days before I tasted. But there are impressive sappy cling and mouthwatering salinity to the finish here, and while I don’t sense that this wine is principally about fruits and berries, a stronger sense of fruit will probably emerge after recovery from bottling. In July, 2010, after 24 years building his estate’s reputation, founder Russ Raney sold Evesham Wood and its attendant Le Puits Sec vineyard to his assistant of several years, Erin Nuccio, a plan the latter says he initially rejected but that grew on him in the course of a year’s cogitation. Inspired by time spent in the 1990s working for DC-area retailer Ann Bertha, Nuccio had gone on to briefly acquire some winemaking skills in Northern California while his wife pursued her career in veterinary medicine, but ultimately (“after a spell of rain in Berkeley as bad as any in northern Oregon,” he jokes) he convinced her that as no other place would enable his dream, they should move to the (as she envisioned it) notoriously well-watered Willamette Valley. “Retiring early,” as Raney puts it, signals a confidence in Nuccio that – on the evidence of my recent conversations and tasting – seems entirely well-placed. There will naturally be changes – including, for starters, a bit more barrel rotation and a move toward spontaneous fermentation (whereas Raney had always sworn by a yeast strain he succeeded in culturing from a bottle of one of Henri Jayer’s 1985s!) – but the understated, typically bright, finely-etched and always unabashedly Burgundy-inspired style that Raney so successfully cultivated is clearly in no danger of dying out at his former address. Nuccio said that already (this was June!) fellow winemakers were calling and teasing him about an allegedly impending harvest: “ ‘So, are you going to pick early like Russ did?’ they ask me, and I say ‘No, I’m going to pick on time like Russ did’!” (Nuncio’s existing label, Haden Fig – profiled in the on-line supplement to this report – will continue in a distinctive style.) Tel. (503) 371-8478