I have said many times that, in terms of price-to-quality, Oregon is crafting the greatest Pinot Noir on earth. Year in and year out, one producer seems to stand out, and that’s Evesham Wood. Winemaker Erin Nuccio’s story is a romantic one: East Coast retail wine guy starts to feel the pull towards actual vineyards and winemaking, wanting to put his passion into practice.
He and his wife make their way out west, where he attends viticulture/enology school and working at vineyards in California. Then he scores an apprenticeship in Oregon’s Willamette Valley under Russ Raney, whose Evesham Wood property, first planted in 1986, is a model of sustainability and small-scale perfectionism (it was certified organic in 2000). Over the years, Nuccio becomes winemaker at Evesham Wood while also launching a brand called Haden Fig (one of SommSelect’s best-selling wines of 2016), and in 2010 Nuccio and his wife, Jordan, purchase Evesham Wood. In addition to bottling wines from Evesham Wood’s jewel-box estate vineyard, “Le Puits Sec” (“The Dry Well”), Nuccio continues the Raney tradition of crafting single-vineyard bottlings from Willamette Valley vineyards that share a philosophy of sustainability: the iconic Temperance Hill Vineyard, a high-elevation site in the Eola Hills, is one of them, and the source for this wine—the Mahonia Vineyard, in the South Salem Hills—is another. Evesham Wood’s 2014 “Mahonia Vineyard” Pinot Noir is one of the best domestic Pinot Noir values we’ll offer this year. It is a serious achievement at this price—a wine with depth, backbone, aromatic complexity, and energy—and it makes the case for Willamette Valley Pinot as convincingly as any I’ve tried recently. Jump on it!
What this 2014 demonstrates, above all else, is that a wine need not be “big” to have a big impact. In the glass it is a translucent garnet red with a touch of light garnet and orange at the rim, while the nose is very perfumed  with beautiful fruit combined with some Old World traits. The nose displays lots of damp rose petal, preserved strawberry, dried black cherry, pomegranate, white tea and wild herbs accented by turned earth, dried orange and toasted exotic spices. Incidentally, the Mahonia Vineyard is named for an evergreen shrub native to the Pacific Northwest called Mahonia Aquifolium, whose small blue berries look like grapes—there is definitely a berries-just-off-the-bush brightness to this wine, its acid perfectly framing the fruit. There’s a nice mineral note and a hint of wood smoke on the finish, which lends to the wine’s complexity on the finish. It’s a beautiful food wine, ready to drink now in Burgundy stems at around 60 degrees, and its moderate alcohol is an added bonus. It’s a Pinot Noir of great detail and finesse, and given that we’re talking about Oregon here, my mind goes right to salmon: I still remember the beautiful, traditional salmon bake I attended many years ago while visiting Oregon wine country, at which large fillets were skewered on tall stakes and angled over a trench filled with hot coals. The smoky flavor of that fish is what I’m after here with the Evesham Wood Pinot. This recipe ought to do nicely. Enjoy!