Three Oregon Pinots Currently Available

Before I started "Thoughts About Fiction," I wrote a blog called "The Wine Commentator" for about six years, reviewing mainly Oregon and California Pinot Noir plus unoaked or lightly oaked Chardonnay.

The point was to discover what my wife and I liked about wine and what we didn't like, and to figure out whether it was worth buying more expensive wine, We learned a great deal.

In the Age of Coronavirus, we're cooking all our dinners at home and drinking wine along with them.  After getting through a certain amount of inventory in our cellar, I realized we needed some Pinot Noir that could be consumed without much aging and asked our local wine merchant what he had available from Oregon's Willamette Valley.

I bought three bottles and my wife and I subjected them to a blind tasting one evening, just like we did back in the old "Wine Commentator" days. That meant trying them all, without knowing which was which,  first before eating any food, and then during the course of dinner.  The bottles were then re-corked and opened again on a second night and sampled one more time.

The wines were:

1) Elk Cove 2017 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir  ($25)
2) Evensham Wood 2018 Dundee Hills Pinot Noir ($27), and
3) North Valley 2017 Soter Vineyard Pinot Noir ($25)

Now, you might say, wait a minute: two of those are of the 2017 vintage and one is of the 2018 vintage so it isn't an even playing field.  I would respond by saying I'm not trying to evaluate which winemaker did best with a particular year's grapes, I'm evaluating which wine a consumer should purchase and these are what were available.

Lets go straight to the bottom line.  We both independently, and on both days, picked the North Valley offering as the clear winner.  It had a nice body weight, noticeably more complexity of flavor, and good acidity. The acidity both enabled the wine to stand up to food better than the other two and it gave the North Valley pinot an attractively bright finish. And this wine was even better when re-opened on the second day (not unusual for young red wine) so don't think you have to consume an entire bottle with one dinner.

On the other end of the spectrum, we both liked the Evesham Wood the least, to the point where after the second round of tasting, I threw out the remaining more than half bottle.  This wine seemed balanced, if bland, upon first tasting, but then an aspect I would described as "dusty" appeared and the finish became less and less pleasant. In other words, the more oxygen it encountered, the less attractive it became. And once again, the two of us were on the same page with respect to this one.

Somewhere in the middle was the Elk Cove.  When we first sampled this wine, before starting to eat our food, I found it disappointingly thin and even a little watery.  My wife described it as bland.  But as time went by and the wine encountered more oxygen, it gained body weight. When the three bottles were reopened on the second day, the Elk Cove  was noticeably better. But it still lacked the complexity and the acidity of the North Valley and because of the latter, came across as a little sweet.

If you tend to drink wine on its on as opposed to with food, you might like the Elk Cove, but I would recommend swirling it around in a decanter to thoroughly oxygenate it before consumption,  This wine really needs to breathe a bit before you drink it.

So there you have it. If you want a satisfying pinot to drink with a meal and you don't plan to cellar it, go for the North Valley pinot if you can find it. This one, too, will benefit from decanting before consumption.

And in this instance, no, you don't have to pay more to get a better bottle of wine.

If you want to learn about wine, I recommend you open more than one bottle at a time, sample them blind without and with food, and on more than one day.  Wine changes.