Last week, the Wine Spectator's Matt Kramer held a seminar titled
"21st Century Pinot Noir Greatness". Approximately 600 people attended.
Pyramid Valley's 2006 Earth Smoke Pinot Noir was selected as
one of only 3 wines in the world to represent said greatness.
Quoting Harvey Steiman, WS blogger who attended the event in NYC:
"...what matters most to me is how much pleasure the wine can deliver. Part of that pleasure derives from the intellectual appreciation of where it comes from and what that means. But it still must be a complete wine, one that delivers delicious primary fruit and complex secondary flavors in a frame that caresses rather than scrapes away with too much tannins, alcohol or acidity...
And in that regard, the New World Pinots can meet Burgundy on an equal footing. That's my opinion, but the French have been very successful over the years at convincing us that their terroir trumps everything. By now, however, it has become abundantly clear that France has no exclusivity on terroir. The differences—between New Zealand's Central Otago and Marlborough, between Oregon's Yamhill-Carlton and Dundee Hills districts, between California's Russian River Valley and Santa Rita Hills—are palpable to everyone's palate now...
All of this set me up perfectly for Kramer's first wine, the Pyramid Valley from New Zealand. Although he said its region, Canterbury, and specifically the northern part, was not very well known for Pinot, I remember being impressed with wines such as Mountford and Giesen in the past, which are made there. But not in this style, which featured racy acidity, minerality and vivid red fruit flavors. I loved the nerve of the wine. And its ripe fruit, a characteristic which featured in the Domaine Drouhin Laurène 2005 from Oregon and the Rhys Santa Cruz Mountains Alpine Vineyard 2006.
As we listened to Kramer and tasted the wines, Laube passed me a note. "Grapes like sunshine!" he wrote. "Duh," I noted.
The three Pinots we presented in our Rising Stars tasting also featured seductive fruit character, but you wouldn't characterize any of them as fruit bombs. They were more like fruit rapiers, slipping their essence of cherry, berry or plum easily into their trappings of silk and elegance. The two Oregon wines, both from the ripe 2006 vintage, found what I consider an ideal balance of fruit and other stuff. The California wine, from 2005, comes from a vineyard at the cool end of Anderson Valley but high above the fog, so the vineyard gets lots of sunshine and the grapes ripen beautifully. You can taste it in the wine's generous but not overripe flavors.
All the Burgundies cost more than $100 a bottle, the New World wines around $55 to $65. You pay a premium for those 2,000 years.
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