Representing a selection from among numerous parcels and lots that differ each year, the 2010 Pinot Noir Prince Hill features strawberry and cranberry, black tea and bay laurel in a tart, smoky, piquant performance that lacks focus or length to measure up to the standard set by the more successful single-site bottlings I tasted from Erath this vintage. It will certainly be worth revisiting though, and is unlikely to fatigue for at least another half dozen years.
Dick Erath realized his first crop (all of 200 cases) in 1972 from vines he planted in 1969 after moving his family north from California. When he approached his new neighbor Jim Maresh about the prospects for wine growing along Worden Hill Road west of Dundee, the latter (85 years old today and still farming) says he sized Erath up as some hippy peddling a dream, but seeing as Maresh was sitting on 200 tons of unsold prunes, he figured he had little to lose by acting on Erath’s intuitions, and in went vines that would become one of North America’s great viticultural treasures. Within a decade, Erath had reached 10,000 cases; then took only four further vintages to triple his output, while continuing to showcase fruit from his Dundee Hills neighborhood. Since then – and since Erath sold his eponymous winery to Ste. Michelle Wine Estates in 2006 – production has soared to well over 100,000 cases. Pharmacist-turned-vintner Gary Horner – who took charge of winemaking responsibilities here in 2003 – remains at that post, and the Erath portfolio continues to showcase sites (now totaling 120 acres) farmed under their close supervision, including a clutch that inform single-site bottlings. (Prince Hill Vineyard, along Worden Hill Rd., is the only remaining actual Erath estate vineyard.) I tasted only a subset of the winery’s recent releases with Horner, whose approach in the cellar includes a for Oregon rare reliance on micro-oxygenation (which, along with cross-flow filtration is – a bit oddly and surely misleadingly – the only topic addressed under “Winemaking Technique” on the Erath website). Other distinctive features of vinification here include there being only a brief cold soak, and a portion of most Pinots being fermented in closed tanks. No musts have been acidulated since 2006. “All Pinots are treated virtually identically,” Horner explains, so as to be able to focus as a winemaking team on the characteristics particular to each site. Summing up his intentions, he told me “I’m trying to keep our style, but turn up the volume.”
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