2022 Estate Vineyard Old Vine Pinot Noir
The Blocks: The vineyard is divided into seventeen individual sections that are all picked, fermented, and barreled separately. The primary blocks of the Estate Vineyard, Old Vine bottling are the Winery Block (1984 planting of Pommard and maybe some other stuff), the Hallelujah Block (a 1990 planting of Pinot Gris grafted to Pinot Noir) and the Lakeview Block (a 1998 planting of Pommard). In 2021 small amounts of the Cougar Block (1998 Pommard), Wadensvil Block (1997) and Coury Clone (2000) found their way into the bottling. These are spotted over the entirety of the vineyard making this an all-encompassing Estate bottling.
Farming Practices: We have done the management of this property internally since we purchased it in 2000 except for 2014 and 2015 when Sterling Fox’s management service did the work. Also, at that time, the vineyard was switched entirely to organic farming practices and remains so to this day. The vineyard has always been dry farmed.
Picking Dates, Tonnages, Tons/Acre: This vineyard has very still air. It is rarely even breezy on the property let alone windy. For most grape growing situations this is terrific. For a frost event it is the worst possible thing. While many areas bounced back and had either mostly normal years or even incredibly bountiful vintages, Ribbon Ridge was massively impacted. We lost all our Chardonnay and averaged only slightly over a ton/acre across the board on the Pinot Noir. Sauvignon Blanc fared slightly better but was still down by historical standards. This led to a situation where, rather than producing up to 6 different Pinot Noirs from the Estate (as we did in 2021), we decided to put all the highest quality blocks into the Estate Old Vine bottling.
Vinification: The frost damage took its toll on this vineyard, creating highly uneven ripening with clusters of seemingly random size. All fruit from all blocks were destemmed to ensure that the maximum positive qualities were extracted from each grape.
Winemaking: All fermentations from the Estate Vineyard in 2022 were comprised of 100% destemmed fruit. Fermentation was encouraged to start earlier than normal with 2-day cold soaks being the norm. Fermentations were more rigorously managed than in other years with both extended pumpovers and punch downs done over the course of 12-13 days. The wine was lightly filtered for clarity sake just before bottling.
Barrels: This 58-barrel bottling consists of only 4 new barrels (5%), a combination of once, twice, and thrice-filled barrels (36%) and a large selection of neutral barrels (59%). Wine was in barrel until late July and bottled in late August allowing for around 10 months in barrel.
Notes: The Estate Vineyard, Old Vine bottling is the flagship wine of Patricia Green Cellars. We felt that it was important to maintain the quality and volume of this bottling in 2022, even at the expense of all the specialized bottlings that have earned incredible praise and accolades over the years. This wine has been the defining wine of this vineyard for two decades. Early in this bottling’s existence we may have made only 300-400 cases of it in any given vintage but as time went on and vines aged into the style that this wine encompasses we climbed to over 1,000 cases annually while still finding plenty of fruit for the Etzel Block, Coury Clone, First Vines, Wadensvil Block and the Bonshaw Block specialty bottlings. To some extent the 2022 vintage is the MOST Estate Old Vine Pinot Noir bottling ever as it literally spans the breadth of the site and includes what would essentially be “declassified” versions of those high-end, block designate bottlings. Expect all the good things this wine usually shows with a little extra gear to it.
The wine finished with numbers of a TA of 5.3, a pH of 3.56, a free sulfur level below 30 ppm and a total sulfur below 75 ppm.
