Evesham Wood Pinot Noir Temperance Hill Vineyard 2023

In 1986, a winemaker named Russ Rainey named his new Oregon label after a village in the English countryside he had no real connection to — the Vale of Evesham — and then went about making Pinot Noir with almost nothing English about it and everything Burgundian. The house yeast strain he eventually settled on was isolated from a bottle of 1986 Domaine Henri Jayer Echezeaux. That's not a stylistic reference. That's literally carrying a piece of one of Burgundy's most mythic winemakers into every fermentation that's happened at this winery since. Rainey was also stubborn about the thing most Willamette Valley producers weren't yet stubborn about: irrigation. He believed turning on a hose erased the very sense of place he was trying to bottle, got his Le Puits Sec vineyard certified organic in 2000 and the winery itself in 2002, and co-founded the Deep Roots Coalition to make the case for dry farming across the whole region. This was not the easy position to hold in Oregon in the early 2000s. He held it anyway. In 2010, after twenty-four years, Rainey and his wife Mary retired and sold the winery to Erin Nuccio, who'd been working alongside them as assistant winemaker since 2007. This wasn't an outside buyer picking up a label for its name. It was a winemaker who'd already spent three years learning the house's actual convictions — low intervention, no filtration, nothing artificial pushing the wine toward more concentration than the vintage actually gave it — taking over the thing she'd already been building. Temperance Hill is where a lot of that philosophy gets its clearest expression. It's a cool site up in the Eola-Amity Hills, 660 to 860 feet, planted back in 1981 by the Koo family on what's believed to be the eroded remains of an ancient volcano — Jory and Nekia soils, red, iron-rich, the kind of ground that shows up again and again in this region's best Pinot sites. The vines are own-rooted Pommard clone, now well into their forties, dry-farmed and certified organic since 2012, managed by the same person, Dai Crisp, since 1999. This isn't a vineyard anyone discovered recently. It's one Oregon's wine world has quietly respected for decades. Evesham Wood ages this one entirely in neutral French oak — no new wood at all, nothing to layer flavor on top of what the vineyard already gives you. What results is a wine that can seem almost closed and a little rugged when you first pour it, purple and black fruit held tight, and then genuinely transform over a few hours into something satiny and cohesive. The tannins are sturdy without ever turning muscular, which tasting notes going back years keep describing as simply typical of this particular hillside. It's an individualistic wine, shaped as much by forty-four-year-old own-rooted vines as by anyone's hand in the cellar. Temperance Hill doesn't have the kind of name that turns heads the way some Willamette vineyards do. It doesn't need to. The pedigree is in the vine age, the soil and the restraint, not the marketing — which, if you've been paying attention to anything else in this email, is exactly the kind of wine I can't resist telling you about. Give it air, give it time, and let a piece of Henri Jayer's own yeast finish the job it's been doing in this valley for forty years. — Ben