2010 Patricia Green Pinot Noir Broadway

Green’s 2010 Pinot Noir Estate Vineyard – which reflects largely Pommard and Wadenswil Pinot selections dry-farmed in low-nutrient, sandy marine sediments that she worked long and hard to open-up – brims with ripe cherry and tat red currant, displaying an almost peachy richness besides. Hints of crushed stone and charred grilled meat add interest and this finishes with impressive persistence if for now a bit stiffly and less mouthwateringly than the best wines here today. Check it again in a couple of years, and count on its remaining youthful for at least 6-8. Patricia (almost universally referred to as “Patty”) Green and Jim Anderson – who met while working at Torii Mor – started-up Patricia Green Cellars and purchased their 52 acre Ribbon Ridge estate in 2000, although the site had already been planted in 1984, the second in its neighborhood. The vinificatory regimen chez Green includes spontaneous fermentation in small lots; extraction via punch-down; and pressing while there is still a last little bit of sugar to barrels not more than 40% of which (and usually significantly fewer) are new. Whole clusters are sometimes included but were not in 2010. The 2010s here with one exception weighed-in between 12.5-13% based on natural sugar (whereas Green elected to chaptalize her 2011s). Tartaric acid was also added. “We shoot for a nervy style when our wines are young,” Anderson told me, and vintage 2010 surely obliged in that regard, though the concern about acids was that the proportion of malic was so high, threatening loss of vivacity once it was converted to lactic. Despite my having tasted a wide range of this estate’s 2010s and (save for an interesting if fading 2002 from Hirsch Vineyard on the Sonoma Coast) solely 2010s, I still missed a significant number of their dozen or more annual bottlings. Incidentally, I have tried to carefully note the A.V.A chosen to grace each of the Patricia Green labels, but this is not the only Willamette estate that seems not to set any recognizable pattern. Thus, for example, the wine from Ana vineyard is labeled “Dundee Hills” whereas that from Durant is labeled as “Willamette” rather than more specifically. Tel. (503) 554-0821