2011 Archery Summit Pinot Noir Archery Summit Estate

Tart and penetrating cranberry and holly berry distillate are accented with tamarind, licorice, and toasted oak in the nose and concentrated palate of the 2011 Pinot Noir Archery Summit Estate. In something of a departure from what I take to be vintage typicity, this displays an opaque sense of density and a measure of gum-numbing tannin. But the vigorous and still sappy finish to this robust Pinot certainly makes an impressive statement, and it ought to merit following for at least the next half dozen years. 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