Tunnell’s 500 cases of 2010 Chardonnay Cascadia – based on a multiplicity of clones on contiguous plots, including a for him relatively recent, 2000 planting – boast effusively ripe pineapple, white peach, and grapefruit piquantly laced with lemon and grapefruit rind, peach kernel, toasted hazelnut, as well as alkaline, saline, marine breeze notes noticeable already in the nose. Buoyant, polished in texture and satisfyingly lees-enriched, yet infectiously juicy in its primary fruitiness all the way through a lip-licking and downright refreshing finish, this bottling should prove delightfully versatile for at least the next 4-5 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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