A vibrant Willamette Valley Pinot Noir to pull you out of the doldrums. Starting at $29, £32.29, €48.50.
It was late in the afternoon and I should have been in my office writing. But the blinking cursor had begun to taunt me and anything I’d managed to eke out was angrily deleted. Finally, internally castigating myself for leaving my desk, I wandered into the kitchen, hitting the bake button as I passed the stove.
The ball of anxiety in my stomach loosened as I sliced through ochre-hued heirloom tomatoes, watching rivulets of juice run into the grooves of the carving board. The food processor whirred together a short crust and, later, while the crust baked, a parsley pesto. I layered the golden crust with Dijon mustard and gruyère, then topped it with the pesto and heirlooms. Glistening crystals of Jacobsen’s Netarts Bay flake salt finished it.
As the house filled with the savoury smell of tomato tart, I pushed into my overstuffed front closet to the wine rack, seeking comfort.
Home. Oregon Pinot Noir. I pulled out a bottle of Roserock Drouhin Oregon Pinot Noir 2022 Eola-Amity Hills and marched it back to the kitchen table where I uncorked it with an overzealous pop.
The original Domaine Drouhin Oregon estate is in Dundee Hills, but the family’s Roserock property is in Eola-Amity – nearby where I worked my first harvest. And it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that the darker fruit, structured tannins and more linear acidity common to wines from this Willamette Valley sub-AVA doesn’t have the added benefit of nostalgic appeal.
The wine’s pale purple colour shone around the rim. Blueberry and black plum greeted me. The tannins were present, more so than on the Pinot from their Dundee Hills property, but not too firm – surprisingly supple. The acid rippled down my tongue, demanding food.
The Drouhin family’s Oregon wines, especially those from the Roserock estate, are not ones that I would generally suggest drinking straight out of the gate – the style is tense and mineral – but the 2022s are remarkably open.
Domaine Drouhin’s Dundee Hills estate, as you may already know, was the first foreign investment in the Willamette Valley wine industry. The story as to how the family came to invest in the Willamette Valley goes something like this: a young Becky Wasserman, an exporter of French wines, visited the Lett family of The Eyrie Vineyards in 1979. As she left, they sent her home with two bottles of their 1975 South Block Reserve. Unbeknown to the Letts, she entered these bottles into the 1979 Gault-Millau Wine Olympiad. The wine placed in the top 10 – outclassing many burgundies. Robert Drouhin, seeing the results, called for a rematch at his estate in 1980. The Eyrie duly sent along their wine. This time it placed second, two-tenths of a point behind Drouhin’s 1959 Chambolle-Musigny.
Impressed with the region’s performance, Drouhin sent his daughter, Véronique, to work for the Letts in 1986. In 1987, the Lett’s son, Jason, worked for the Drouhins. And in 1987 the Drouhins bought a nearby property in the Dundee Hills (which wasn’t even an appellation at the time) and christened it Domaine Drouhin Oregon. Véronique Drouhin has been making wine in the Willamette Valley ever since.
In 2013, looking to expand outside the Dundee Hills, the Drouhins purchased 279 acres (113 ha) in the Eola-Amity Hills (an additional 26 acres were purchased in 2022), 122 acres (49 ha) of which are planted. The first vintage of Roserock Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, the 2014, was released in 2016. The vines on this property range from 16 to 20 years old and are planted on volcanic soils (Jory, Ritner and Nekia specifically). They produce two Pinot Noirs from this site: the standard bottling and Zéphirine, a barrel selection that has a bit more body and spice but is not generally as open on release. I am recommending the former.
They hand-pick the grapes, then transport them to the winery where they are entirely destemmed. The must is transferred to a stainless-steel tank where it is kept cool during a three-day cold-soak. It then undergoes fermentation with ambient yeasts. The wine is pressed after 17–22 days and is moved to 225-litre French oak barrels, 20% of which are new, where it spends 11 months before bottling. The resulting wine is 14.1% alcohol with bright acidity and excellent concentration of fruit. While it’s lovely now, it does benefit from food and I can attest that a tomato tart brings out the fruit and mellows the acid. If you’d like to drink it on its own, I would wait a year before broaching, or go for the 2021.
This wine is carried by over 100 stockists in the US. The UK does not yet have the 2022 vintage, but it should be popping up on shelves within the next month. In the meantime, the just-as-lovely 2021 is carried by more than a dozen stockists – with the lowest per-bottle price listed at All About Wine. It is also available in France, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, Luxembourg, Canada, Greece, Iceland, Japan, Spain, Denmark, Brazil and the British Virgin Islands.
Every Friday we provide you with a free recommendation for a particularly delicious, ready-to-drink wine that’s available on both sides of the pond and at a very good price. Members can find reviews of many more wines from Drouhin’s Oregon wineries in our tasting notes database.