Few producers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (or anywhere, for that matter) have captured the hearts of the SommSelect team quite like Evesham Wood. We’re consistently blown away by the value-for-dollar these wines offer, and winemaker/proprietor Erin Nuccio’s finessed touch with Pinot Noir is right up our alley. This Willamette Valley bottling is Nuccio’s largest-production offering, but “large” is not the right word here—by any standard, 4,200 cases qualifies as “boutique” production, and yet the price point on this regional benchmark remains extraordinarily low. This is domestic Pinot Noir crafted with Burgundian sophistication and sensibility, and we all know what that usually means. But Willamette Valley producers like Nuccio have managed to hold the line, prompting us to proclaim repeatedly that this is where the world’s best Pinot Noir values reside. If ever there were a Pinot Noir to snap up by the case, this is surely it!
Erin Nuccio’s story has been told here many times before: He was an East Coast retail wine guy who began to feel the pull towards actual vineyards and winemaking, wanting to put his passion into practice. He and his wife made their way out west, where he attended viticulture/enology school and worked in California vineyards. He eventually landed an apprenticeship in the Willamette Valley under Russ Raney, whose Evesham Wood property, first planted in 1986, was a model of sustainability and small-scale perfectionism (it was certified organic in 2000). Over the years, Nuccio became winemaker at Evesham Wood while also launching a brand called Haden Fig (another SommSelect customer favorite), and in 2010 Nuccio and his wife, Jordan, purchased Evesham Wood.
In addition to bottling wines from Evesham Wood’s jewel-box estate vineyard, “Le Puits Sec” (“The Dry Well”), Nuccio continues to craft single-vineyard bottlings from sustainably farmed sites across the Willamette Valley. This Willamette Valley-designate draws from nearly a dozen vineyards across multiple sub-AVAs, including the Eola-Amity Hills and South Salem. Willamette Valley’s two primary soil types—volcanic basalt known as “jory” and silty marine sediment—are therefore represented.
And, as with all the Evesham Wood wines, this flagship bottling is made entirely by hand: It’s hand-harvested, fermented in open-topped vats, and “punched down” (pushing the cap of skins into the juice during fermentation) manually. The wine spent about 10 months aging in mostly used French oak barrels before bottling.
As many SommSelect-ers already know well, these are always wines of lively energy and finesse, with lots of lifted perfume and plenty of mineral “cut” (not often found in domestic Pinots). In the glass, this fresh and aromatic ’22 shines a bright, reflective ruby moving to magenta/pink at the rim. The aromas are a mix of wild strawberry, raspberry, cherry kirsch, dried rose petals, sandalwood, herbs, and turned earth. The key feature of this wine is its nerve: It really shows a deft hand in terms of the fruit extraction, which enables some of the soil character to show through. It’s medium-bodied, with a silky yet taut texture and just the right bit of spicy twang on the finish. Given the whole Pacific Northwest vibe, I almost always recommend salmon in some form as a pairing for this wine. Decant it about 15 minutes before serving at 60 degrees in Burgundy stems with the recipe attached. There’s simply no better Pinot Noir value out there!
