Solena Domaine Danielle Laurent Legacy Pinot Noir, Yamhill-Carlton District, USA

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The 2017 Pinot Noir Domaine Danielle Laurent has a medium ruby color and a nose of woodsmoke, underbrush, tree bark, fir and stone with a core of soft black fruits. The palate is medium-bodied and earthy with a chewy frame and great freshness. 600 cases produced.

Pale to medium ruby-purple colored, the 2015 Pinot Noir Domaine Danielle Laurent has notes of chocolate box, baking spices and lavender with a core of warm red cherries and raspberry leaves. The medium-bodied palate is soft and spicy, with a good amount of expressive red berry and spicy flavors, finishing long and perfumed.

The 2014 Pinot Noir Domaine Danielle Laurent was picked from 15-22 September and matured for eight months in 55% new oak. I find that the new wood is a little dominant on the nose and deprives the fruit from expressing itself. The palate is medium-bodied with supple tannin, a light marine influence entering towards the finish, which actually shows more sophistication than the nose suggests. I would have just dialed down the fruit a notch.

The 2012 Pinot Noir Domaine Danille Laurent is from the original plantings on the estate and has been farmed biodynamically since 2004. It has quite an intense and pure, dark cherry and raspberry coulis bouquet, floral scents (violet and iris) emerging with aeration. The palate is medium-bodied with ripe tannin, slightly chewy red berry fruit with plenty of raspberry and wild berry fruit laced with fig and brown spices toward the finish. Give this a year in bottle.

From a biodynamically-farmed five-acre, 11 year-old plating of seven clones, the Montalieus’ 2011 Pinot Noir Domaine Danielle Laurent is possessed of welcome, saliva-liberating salinity; a stony undertone; and a sort of cyanic glow of fruit pit, along with abundantly sappy fresh cherry and plum. A sachet-like mingling of dried herbs and faded flowers on the nose emerges as this stands open, to add allure. The feel is firm, but the finish sustained, and I suspect this will merit attention through at least 2017. Laurent Montalieu expressed more sanguinity and less surprise than most of his colleagues at both the prospects he thought 2011 harbored as it was being harvested, and the success of his resultant wines – which include not only his and spouse Danielle Andrus Montalieu’s Solena bottlings and those of the affiliated Domaine Danielle Laurent Vineyard just east of Yamhill, but also those of historic Hyland Estate south of McMinnville (which they co-own), and Four Graces which he vinifies for the Black family. “I think we have all the tools that we’ve been investing in forever,” says Montalieu – an early Willamette proponent of biodynamic farming – in his idiomatic, French-accented way “and we’ve had to use them very little. But here came a vintage in which you had to use all of those tools, in terms of sorting and how to get out (of the grape) what you needed, but also the viticultural tools: how to prune and manage and pick-out what we needed to at the proper time. And I think we are all quite well prepared by 2010 because of it being (so) late. And after we got those 2010s into bottle just happy that harvest was over, six months later the wines were magnificent. They’d made a change that I’ve never seen in a wine. So we went into 2011, like, ‘don’t worry about anything!’.” Picking for these 2011 Pinots took place primarily already in the third week of October. Montalieu said he added some enzymes to a few early lots as a precaution, “but then we saw that we were going to get good extraction and didn’t need them.” Tartaric acid was added to some musts from young vines. As usual at this address, multiple vinificatory regimens were employed lot-by-lot, with bottling at 11 months for the Grand Cuvee, and 13 for the single-vineyard Pinots. (More on Montalieu’s methods and vineyard sources can be found in my issue 202 coverage of both Solena and Hyland Estate’s estate-bottlings.) Tel. (503) 662-3700