The tart-edged blackberry fruit of Archery Summit’s 2011 Pinot Noir Premier Cuvee – around half of which comes from their Arcus vineyard – picks up vanilla, resin, and spice from the barrels (one-third new) in which it was matured. A sweet-tart and subtly smoky finish reveals a sense of confiture unusual for this vintage; but there is also a vintage-typical bit of berry seed crunch whose bitterness is reinforced by a hint of tannic gum-numbing. (The alcohol is a modest, vintage-typical bare-13%.) I’d anticipate drinking this over the next couple of years.
This March, Archery Summit experienced its fourth changing of the winemaking guard, as Chris Mazepink – previously at Benton Lane and Shea – replaced Anna Matzinger, about whose influence and successes there I wrote at length in Issue 202, and who was responsible for the 2011s I tasted this summer. I was surprised to hear Mazepink characterize the 2011 vintage as “slightly fragile and frail as a whole” – he much prefers 2010 – but he admitted to limited experience; and he puts great emphasis on textural richness. Still, his characterization certainly doesn’t apply to many wines that I tasted for this report, even if there were instances in the present collection where I had a sense that perhaps more fermentative extraction and exposure to new wood had been attempted than was in a wine’s best interests. (Since five out of seven wines here are routinely bottled before the following harvest, they in fact received a significantly shorter than usual elevage this vintage.) Matzinger, incidentally, stuck by her selective but often substantial inclusion of stems and whole clusters. (Considerable detail concerning the Archery Summit vineyard sites and what I now must refer to as Matzinger’s legacy can be found in my Issue 202 introduction.)
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