Trisaetum’s 2012 Riesling Dry Ribbon Ridge offers more vivid, luscious and interesting citricity than does its Coast Range counterpart, with tangerine joining lime on a pungently zesty nose and generously juicy palate. The gross chemistry of the two is virtually identical, but here the sweetness is entirely integrated – though no doubt offering critical support – and the finish clearer and infectiously juicy. There is a vaguely Mosel-like sense of wet stone as a sort of sounding board for the fruit and of dynamically interactive exchange with crystalline mineral notes such as one longs for, but as yet too-seldom finds, in “New World” Riesling. What’s more, this terrific value boasts a surprisingly silken feel for a wine dramatically low in pH and bottled (albeit with lees contact) a mere three months from harvest, as well as a saliva-liberating streak of salinity. It should surely be worth savoring through at least 2016, though hopefully well beyond.
James Frey’s Tristaetum – whose highly sophisticated Ribbon Ridge facility (including an “air knife” on their extra-wide sorting belt for instantly removing water, not to mention bugs) will now host Louis Jadot’s new project with Resonance Vineyard – continues, entering their seventh vintage in 2013, to display considerable promise with both Pinot and Riesling, now from three distinctive sites, since the diminutive Wichmann Vineyard in Dundee (next to Archery Summit’s Red Hills Estate) has now joined their Ribbon Ridge and Coast Range estate vineyards. (The latter is dramatically situated in an extreme southwestern appendage of the Yamhill-Carlton A.V.A, whose borders were reputedly drawn so as not to exclude such a promising slope. For more on Frey’s sites and methodology, consult my introduction to this winery in Issue 202.) Surprisingly given vintage norms, Frey claims not to have needed to drop significant Pinot crop from his Ribbon Ridge vineyard in 2011 and to still have come in under two tons per acre. (His other two vineyards regularly produce slightly more.) “We had big bunches,” relates co-winemaker Greg McClellan, “but there wasn’t much consistency, and there weren’t overly many of them.” The 2011 Pinot harvest was finished on November 2, eight days before the ten of Riesling-picking even began, because – much as in 2010 – while must weights were already high enough in early November, pHs remained extremely low and malic acid was stubbornly persistent. Despite that chemistry, Riesling was once again bottled already in February. Frey and McClellan claim to have had more than 80 different fermenting lots from 50 tons of 2011 Riesling alone (in tanks, casks, and even one concrete egg), which suggests abundant data-points and opportunities to experiment with and improve their regimen of fermentation and elevage. The promisingly straggly and small-berried bunches I saw on their vines this year, as well as what they oxymoronically describe as their “retentive” scrupulousness in sorting, should also help advance quality going forward. No stems were retained in 2011 for the Pinot ferments, and those musts were at most minimally chaptalized, with bottled wines hovering around 12.5% alcohol.
Tel. (503) 538-9898
