Cinnamon-, bacon- and barrel toast-tinged sweet-tart cherry fruit dominates the Archery Summit 2011 Pinot Noir Red Hills Estate and there is an over-abundance of rustic tannin for which sheer fruitiness and vintage-typical sense of tart fruit acids insufficiently compensate. (That having been claimed, I should re iterate a point made when I reviewed the 2010, namely that the mix of barrels chosen for this cuvee and the way they are used strikes me as detrimental, but the fact that they have remained a constant strongly suggests that some tasters very much like the effect.) I won’t deny that this has impact and grip. Those who feel comfortable about a lot of toasted and tannic oak may want to follow this for the next few 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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