There are only 270 cases of Brick House’s 2010 Pinot Noir Cuvee du Tonnelier which, as every year, features a sedimentary soiled block and the estate’s oldest Pommard Selection (a.k.a. UCD 4 clone) vines, and is named for the derivation of Tunnell’s family name and in tribute to his dad. Smoky Lapsang tea, licorice, bittersweet floral perfumes, dark fresh cherry, and blackberry scent and flavor this darkly-intense Pinot, whose mingling of salted roast meat pan drippings, toasty nut oils, and soy makes for an effect of strikingly saliva-inducing finishing savor. A bottle opened to the air for an hour and a half displayed no less umami and even more cut and energy. Clear, fine-grained, and truly elegant, this ought to be delightfully versatile and persistently intriguing over at least the next 8-10 years.
In 1988, CBS foreign correspondent Doug Tunnell – having picked up a love of wine and then a viticultural itch during professional assignments in France and Germany, and heard with excitement about the commitment the Drouhins were making to Willamette wine growing – began prospecting by proxy the countryside where he had grown up. In 1990, he “retired” from the stressful globetrotting that had made him internationally familiar to pursue another labor-intensive vocation, growing Pinot Noir with both environmental sensitivity and the highest qualitative ideals, on a southeast-facing, basalt-based bowl very near which Harry Peterson-Nedry was farming and, by the time Tunnell arrived, Michael Etzel had just begun establishing the Beaux Freres Vineyard. By 1995, Tunnell had completed most of his intended planting, having established a good base of ungrafted Pommard Selection Pinot Noir, but soon thereafter also was able to take advantage of the clonal material which was then just becoming available from Dijon, and which he grafted to phylloxera-resistant rootstock as a precaution. Tunnel’s hands-on research has made him one of this country’s prime inspirations and go-to authorities on the practice of biodynamic viticulture, a subject on which – even to a skeptic like me – he comes off as anything but superstitious or doctrinaire. Supplemental to his own 30 vine acres, Tunnell farms and produces a Pinot Noir from Halliday Hill Vineyard, literally across the road. On top of his understandable devotion to Pinot Noir, he is a self-professed Chardonnay lover and among the very rare growers and defenders of Gamay outside of Beaujolais..For Pinot, Tunnell retains up to half whole clusters with selective retention of stems. Each parcel results in multiple lots, later assembled, and since 2006 the same cuvee names have been utilized for his Pinots, with three corresponding to particular parts of his vineyard and two ranging across his entire property, the more elite of that pair – dubbed “Evelyn’s” – not bottled every vintage. “Sometimes when I consider how Evelyn’s has turned out – the only Pinot in which I blend the Pommard Selection with the Dijon clones – I do ask myself why I don’t just make one single wine each year along similar lines.” Then Tunnell answers his own question: “But I enjoy the intellectual challenge and the stimulation that comes from producing all of these different cuvees.” Spontaneous fermentation normally kicks in within three days (rapid by Willamette standards); extraction is via sparing manual punch-downs; and there can often be seven to as many as 14 days of post-fermentative cap contact. Whether or not it’s more on account of his atypical vinificatory regimen or the uniqueness of a site he cultivates with such painstaking devotion – or both – Tunnel’s wines Pinots are highly distinctive: nuanced, complex, with an elegant sense of energy and lift (particularly in a vintage like 2010, or in the promising 2011s he showed me from barrel), yet often as not unabashedly, almost literally down-to-earth.
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