2010 St. Innocent Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard

From a steep block on the eastern side of this famous vineyard complemented by some old vines on a broad upper terrace; dominated by Pommard Selection; and his only wine of the vintage to reach 13% alcohol (and then just barely), Vlossak’s 2010 Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard smells of dark cherry, purple plum and holly berry, all shadowed by their penetrating, spirituous counterparts and tinged with mace. With considerable richness and textural polish, this comes off as softer and sweeter at mid-palate than I anticipated from the nose; but bitterness of cherry pit and holly berry serves for a real sense of back-end invigoration, and a combination of saliva-liberating salinity and sheer sappy cling helps guarantee the desire to take the next sip. Giving what he considered the four best barrels from this vineyard 16 months before bottling, Vlossak rendered a Shea Special Selection – “my favorite wine of the vintage,” he called it, and the only such selection this vintage – that was sold to mailing list customers en primieur and expected to be released late; but he didn’t offer to show it to me in June. Founder-winemaker Mark Vlossak – whose St. Innocent winery will soon celebrate its first quarter century – constructed a new facility on the grounds of Zenith vineyard in 2006 after he and vineyard proprietors Kari and Tim Ramey arranged a quid pro quo whereby St. Innocent owns shares in Zenith – from whose previous owner they had bought fruit for O’Connor Vineyard bottlings – who now supply a significant share of St. Innocent’s fruit; whilst Vlossak makes the Rameys’ Zenith wines. (My account of recent Zenith releases appears in the separate on-line report in this issue.) These developments took place against the background of St. Innocent losing access to the fruit of Seven Springs Vineyard (now under contract to Evening Land, as discussed in my coverage in this report of that two-state, multi-regional project), after having been that vineyard’s largest customer and their reputations having been closely linked since St. Innocent’s inception. Vlossak says he favors relatively large fermentation tanks whose mass encourages fermentation temperatures “above 80 degrees F. for five to seven days. I just think that gives a different, richer feel in the mouth that’s sort of the signature for what I do. My aim is to build that kind of fine structure, not to achieve bigness or super-ripeness.” He de-stems but nowadays is able to (and does) work with up to half whole berries. “I do inoculate” for fermentation, explains Vlossak, “but only a tiny pile of yeasts in one corner, and I almost never add SO2 (at that stage), so the idea is that I want the indigenous things to grow, and whoever wins (the race to efficacy) wins. I don’t punch-down a lot,” he continues, “and I never pump-over. I’m looking for a certain texture and I don’t worry about whether the wine has gone completely dry before putting into tank to settle for three or four days” and thence to barrels, of which usually 30-40% are new. Pressing is very gentle, cautious, and quantitatively inefficient. The 2010s are a very bright, generally tart bunch, all but one of which weight in at below 13% alcohol. Time, alas, always being limited, Vlossak only had me taste the 2009 Pinots from the couple of sites that were too cool to subject to single-vineyard bottlings in 2010, and the combination of that very ripe vintage with those sites and Vlossak’s approach was especially impressive, making me wish I’d had a chance to taste more of St Innocent’s 2009s. Tel. (503) 932 2129