2002 Archery Summit Pinot Noir Arcus Estate

Scents of ripe plum and cherry with their distilled counterparts; saline, alkaline, and slightly fishy ocean breeze; herbal-floral sachet; and smoky black tea all intriguingly inform the nose of Archery Summit 2002 Pinot Noir Arcus Estate, then reprise on a tender palate, leading to a hauntingly smoky, alkaline, and still sweetly-fruited finish in which a hint of barrel toast and slight catch of tannin, while a bit rustic, can easily be overlooked. (Up to and including this vintage, Archery Summit favored almost exclusively an especially aggressive if prestigious brand of barrels, well more than half of which were renewed each year.) This is the vintage in which complete responsibility for vinification essentially fell into Anna Matzinger’s lap (“is it in me?” she says she asked herself, “I had no idea”) and she can be enormously proud of the job she did. Amid the boilerplate on Archery Summit’s web site, I failed to find even a mention of this estate’s visionary 1993 founder Gary Andrus, let alone any sense of its colorful early history, which at the time I followed from afar, but several times discussed with him. Then again, it’s not as though the current owners of this quadripartite hundred-plus acre Dundee icon are trying to insert themselves prominently into the picture; in fact, I’m given to understand that the lack of any sense for who or what is Crimson Wine Group that one derives from a perusal of their web site is entirely by design and in keeping with their desire to maintain a low profile. Happily, internationally-experienced Anna Matzinger – who, following three years as assistant winemaker, took the reins here in 2002 (the year after Andrus sold his remaining interests) – couldn’t hide her light under a basket press if she wanted to, and proves to be as savvy, inquisitive and insightful in her perspectives on late 20th century wine history as she is on matters viticultural and vinificatory. I was relieved as well as delighted once I got down to tasting, at how long and decisive the strides are with which she is clearly walking the proverbial walk. Archery Summit’s wines may with good reason have already impressed a lot people – as witness inter alia the prices at which they trade – but I think we can rest assured that the best is yet to come. In addition to Archery Summit’s four Dundee vineyards (and a fifth was just purchased) they hold a long-term lease on Looney Vineyard in Ribbon Ridge. (For a bit more about each site, see my tasting notes on the corresponding 2010s.) Spontaneous fermentation is being paralleled by a three year academic research project to identify and follow the surprisingly diverse range of yeasts coming from each of the estate’s vineyards, and which Matzinger suspects remain efficacious “through the first couple of weeks of fermentation, after which probably a dominant Saccharomyces species probably takes over.” She isn’t wary of adding tartaric acid (including in high-malic 2010) and favors selective but generally substantial inclusion of stems in her fermentations, which take place largely in small, customized steel bins that permit gentle “tip over,” and in the estate’s impressive collection of wooden uprights. “I like a long, cold (pre-fermentative) soak,” she says, and her preference is for extended vatting times, running past dryness – “and on Renegade Ridge, we are farming that biodynamically, so I like to keep that in for 28 days, a full lunar cycle.” Fermentative extraction is “recently (utilizing) much fewer punch-downs – sometimes just one a day, versus the six (!) that were happening when I came here in 1999 – and more pouring-overs: particularly in the last two vintages when we’ve been chaptalizing, this was a great tool, and I wonder whether it helped us produce glycerol; (anyway) I like the idea. I have become a fan of cleaner wine to barrel,” she adds – indicating another departure from her predecessors’ regimens – so the wine, all free-run, is settled before going to (30-60% new) barrel, a precaution against reduction that most Oregon winemakers find needful. Racking and bottling is accomplished using a tank elevator that, like Matzinger, I wonder now why I’ve never seen anywhere else. The estate’s “premier cuvee” – assembled from all of its vineyards and bottled at 11 months – represents up to 5,000 cases, or 40-60% of total production, so that as with a great many Oregon wineries, the later-bottled, single-vineyard wines of which there is typically only 10-20% as much, are sold largely direct. Tel. (503) 864-4300