2011 Evening Land Chardonnay Seven Springs Vineyard

While there are only 346 cases of it, Evening Land’s 2011 Chardonnay Seven Springs Vineyard represents what will henceforth count as their intro-level white bottling, one whose volume will increase as young, newly planted, and about-to-be-planted estate vines (including in a new section adjacent to Bethel Heights) come on-line. White peach, apricot, and quince make for a lusciously fruity impression that is in turn wreathed in honeysuckle and heliotrope; laced with brightly juicy, enlivening lime and orange; bedded on a silken, creamy pillow; and suffused with saliva-liberating salinity in a long, lip-smacking, “could we please do that again!” finish. And this is from young vines (albeit, note, of considerable clonal diversity)! Of course, Dominique Lafon knows a thing or two about Chardonnay. And I have every reason to believe in the special talents of both Isabelle Meunier and Seven Springs terroir. But this wonderful wine is still simply a poster child for something that should by now have become evident, namely that some of the world’s most deliciously distinctive and complex Chardonnays already do – and in future, increasingly will – come from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. What’s more, this represents one fine value by international standards for its cepage, or indeed any other. This year represented my first opportunity to visit the winemaking facilities of Evening Land – improvised but spacious and with no expense spared on wooden fermenters and top-grade barriques – in a warehouse complex near downtown Salem. It was also my first opportunity to visit with manager Ryan Hannaford and winemaker Isabelle Meunier their expanding Seven Springs Vineyard – impeccably tended and indicative of considerable experimentation. Plans currently call for a dedicated winery to be built at the Seven Springs site only in 3-4 years. Meanwhile, the additional acreage that is coming on-line is enabling Evening Land to move away from purchased fruit at the lower-end of their portfolio and emphasize estate fruit – entirely in the case of Chardonnay. The investors and wine celebrities behind this venture (for more about which, consult my introduction in Issue 202) may not exactly have endeared themselves to the local winemaking community – especially those cut off from Seven Springs fruit – but they are not only clearly here to stay, they are also clearly making investments and taking chances that will be among those developments to take Willamette Valley wines to new qualitative heights. Let it not go unmentioned, for instance, that from the inception of this project, tagging and selecting of vines has been taking place to over the years laboriously create Seven Springs’ own massale selections, the sort of crucial work that sadly not nearly one in a hundred wine estates worldwide nowadays undertakes. Sensibly as it seems to me – but surprisingly rare among the vintners whom I visited for this report – Meunier and her collaborateur, Dominique Lafon, elected to bottle their top 2011s later than they had previous vintages (specifically, in April) so as to retain a normal length of elevage following such a late harvest. “Primary fermentations went through pretty quick once the fruit got into the warmer winery environment, but malo was super-late,” reports Meunier, chuckling. “In this cellar we normally do malos over the spring, but in 2011 – with such low pH and high malate – we didn’t finish malo until July, very style Bourguignon. I used fewer punch-downs and more pump-overs,” she continues, “because I felt that punching-down was going to squeeze the grape too hard. You didn’t want to touch the seeds too much because they weren’t completely ripe.” Pressing, too, was therefore even more gentle and cautious than usual. Musts came in at around 12% natural alcohol, and were chaptalized only around a half to three-quarters of a degree, marginally more than in 2010. There was selective acidulation to compensate for the high levels of malic acid typical in 2011 (i.e. for their eventual transformation to lactic acid), yet, amazingly, finished pHs here are not only significantly higher than I encountered elsewhere, they are only very slightly variant between 2011 and 2012, a feature which Meunier and her team credit at least in part to biodynamic vineyard practices, though more precisely what might be causally involved I was unable to fathom. All of the 2011 fruit was destemmed; and even in years when the condition of the stems is deemed optimum, they are used only very selectively other than in a dedicated vendange entier bottling, “Red Queen,” which was not essayed in 2011. Tel. (805) 736-9656