I recently asked a prominent Oregon winemaker visiting Seattle the price of his least expensive pinot noir. The answer was $36 a bottle.
"When people say, 'I really like pinot noir, but I can't justify spending more than $20 a bottle,' what do you tell them?" I asked.
He scratched his head and looked puzzled. Then he told me about a $20 pinot made by another Oregon winemaker that he had liked a couple of years earlier. "But it's now $30 a bottle and I don't like it as much -- different vintage," he said.
He had no recommendations.
I got a similar answer a week or so later from a producer in California who offers his least expensive pinot for around $35 a bottle.
He looked slightly embarrassed at the question and started talking about how the film "Sideways" had created a boom in pinot consumption, driving up the price of grapes to levels that left what he considered good pinot out of the reach of ordinary consumers (many of whom would consider $20 a bottle a serious reach). He, too, had no recommendations.
Readers of this blog know that we probably try more pinot noir costing $30 a bottle and up than most consumers do -- in the interest of science, of course (!) -- but we also try hard to identify good pinot costing a lot less than that. This posting looks at three "affordable" candidates:
Angeline 2006 Pinot Noir ($16), California
Erath 2006 "Oregon" Pinot Noir ($19), Oregon
Fleur 2006 Pinot Noir ($15), California
Lets get straight to the point: these three wines are very similar -- our latest panel of three tasters had to split hairs trying to rank them in order -- and all are Recommended.
They are better consumed with food than without. Both the Fleur, which has a slightly bigger body than the other two, and the Angeline tasted just a tad "grapey" on their own, but not so with a meal. The Erath is a bit lighter in body than the other two and is devoid of any grapey aspect, but, on the other hand, consumed alone it might taste a little bit thin.
All three of these wines will improve if they are cellared for awhile -- say one to three years. To drive this point home, I also pulled out a bottle of Belle Pente's 2003 "Willamette Valley" Pinot Noir ($17 -- when purchased a couple of years ago) and without telling the others the vintage, asked them what they thought about it compared to the other three we were blind-tasting.
"It's smoother," one panel member said, and it was. I also thought the flavors had come together more coherently. For an inexpensive Oregon pinot, it had become very satisfying.
But let's state the obvious: consumers are not going to find the finest expressions of the pinot noir grape in any of these offerings, cellared or not. These are not complex, terrior-driven wines, speaking of particular soils or clones, or of the intensity of very limited bottlings of only the choicest grapes.
On the other hand, these wines successfully express the fundamental aspects of pinot noir that set this grape unmistakably apart from other red wine varietals, such as cabernet sauvignon, merlot, syrah and zinfandel. Pinots are lighter in body, fresher tasting and generally more oriented toward red fruits such as cherries and raspberries.
When well made -- and all three of these wines are well made -- pinots are easy to drink, especially with salmon, duck, veal, simply cooked chicken and a wide range of summer main-course salads.
Our three-judge panel enjoyed consuming all three of these wines with one meal and two of us found they all held up well with other dinners on subsequent days after the partially consumed bottles had been pumped and rubber-corked in the interim.
Angeline is a second-label of Martin Ray Winery in California's Sonoma County and the 2006 version of this wine is made entirely from pinot noir grapes grown in two vineyards in the Russian River Valley. That's a change from 2005, when small quantities of syrah and merlot were blended in.
One often sees Angeline offered by-the-glass in restaurants and, indeed, that is how I first encountered it. Relatively inexpensive pinot noir by the glass is often not a particularly good bet, but I was sufficiently impressed by the 2005 Angeline to write it up. The 2006 is equally good for what it purports to deliver and very good value at the price.
Erath is a long-established winery in the Dundee Hills region of Oregon's Willamette Valley, and it produces pinot noir at several different price points. Here's what the winery has to say about the one we tasted:
"The largest volume, most affordable and first to be released each year is the 'Oregon.' It tends to be light in color and body, straight forwardly fruity, and is low in tannins for early drinking and enjoyment."
I agree. If you find heavier-bodied pinots just a little syrupy, the Erath is a very good alternative in the less-than-$20-a-bottle price range.
Have you ever bought a bottle of wine because you really liked the label? Admit it, who hasn't?
Well, Fleur, which comes from the Carneros region of California's Napa Valley, has a beautiful label (featuring, of course, flowers) and as a result, I was really hoping it would turn out to be good.
Of the three wines that we blind-sampled in this comparative tasting, the Fleur had the most prominent bouquet and, as mentioned above, slightly the biggest body. As a result, it was a little more mouth-filling than the other two -- noticeably more so than the Erath and very slightly more so than the Angeline.
Two of our three panelists liked that ;and placed the Fleur first. I thought it was a little too much with the food and placed it third. I have to admit, however, that of the three bottles, this was the first one to be totally consumed.
For the record, the Erath and Fleur pinots are listed as 13,5% alcohol by volume while the Angeline checks in at 13.6% Those are all acceptable numbers.
I suppose winemakers who start their pinots at around $35 a bottle won't be drinking much of these three wines and neither will the "Sideways" crowd, but I think the rest of us can not only drink them with pleasure, but serve them to our friends with confidence.
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