2000 Archery Summit Pinot Noir Archery Summit Estate

From Founder Gary Andrus’ last year at the winery he founded – and vinified by Sam Tannahill – the 2000 Pinot Noir Archery Summit Estate showed impressively alongside its 2011 counterpart, a certain tannic rusticity testifying to the fearlessness with which Andrus himself preferred to extract whatever his fruit and barrels offered, but no drying out of the dark, confitured berry flavors. Mace, burley tobacco, and peat contribute spice and metaphorically dark savor of a sort that fits the wine’s textural granularity. There is admirable persistence here and I wouldn’t hesitate to follow along for another 2-3 years if one’s bottles have been perfectly stored (and lucky). This March, Archery Summit experienced its fourth changing of the winemaking guard, as Chris Mazepink – previously at Benton Lane and Shea – replaced Anna Matzinger, about whose influence and successes there I wrote at length in Issue 202, and who was responsible for the 2011s I tasted this summer. I was surprised to hear Mazepink characterize the 2011 vintage as “slightly fragile and frail as a whole” – he much prefers 2010 – but he admitted to limited experience; and he puts great emphasis on textural richness. Still, his characterization certainly doesn’t apply to many wines that I tasted for this report, even if there were instances in the present collection where I had a sense that perhaps more fermentative extraction and exposure to new wood had been attempted than was in a wine’s best interests. (Since five out of seven wines here are routinely bottled before the following harvest, they in fact received a significantly shorter than usual elevage this vintage.) Matzinger, incidentally, stuck by her selective but often substantial inclusion of stems and whole clusters. (Considerable detail concerning the Archery Summit vineyard sites and what I now must refer to as Matzinger’s legacy can be found in my Issue 202 introduction.) Tel. (503) 864.4300