Oregon Pinot Noir possesses many different guises, but wines such as this one, the 2009 Siduri Arbre Vert Vineyard Pinot Noir, from the northern end of the Willamette Valley appellation, seem to cry out for salmon on the grill. For us, combine this culinary delight with a cellar temperature bottle of the 2009 Arbre Vert Vineyard Pinot Noir and our life will be complete...at least for one evening.

The 2009 vintage in the Willamette Valley was an odd one. Harvest ran late and the crop ran heavy. We dropped a lot of fruit, going to one cluster per shoot shortly after flowering. Nonetheless yields ran high, with cluster weights being twice normal. Further thinning made no sense, as less than one cluster per shoot simply encourages shoot and leaf growth. So we stayed with the one-cluster-per-shoot route in the vineyard and chose to compensate at the winery for the higher than normal cluster weight by routinely performing a bleed off of juice prior to fermentation. We picked the Arbre Vert Pinot Noir in three different installments, beginning on October 2nd and ending on October 13th (while dodging raindrops). Some of the grapes had very ripe stems and we were able to utilize whole clusters in the ferments for those lots, but others were much less ripe, so those lots were destemmed. Altogether, we fermented seven distinct lots of Arbre Vert Pinot Noir, keeping each separate and then selecting from each to blend the final wine. Ultimately, we settled on a small blend of nine barrels for the final wine.

The 2009 Siduri Arbre Vert Vineyard Pinot Noir is light in color, but full of spicy raspberry flavors, a creamy mid-palate and a finish full of flowers and lively acidity. This is a complex and complete bottle of wine, capable of turning a simple summer evening into a special moment in time!

Cases: 432
Released: June 2011