Anyway: our friends own a small vineyard in the Eola Hills near Salem, Vermeer Vineyard. They source the grapes to smaller Oregon Pinot producers, including Stangeland. Randy brought a bottle of the new vintage, and even though it may be suffering a bit of bottle shock, but it was a juicy, austere, light, lean, bright raspberry fruit pinot that tastesz nothing like California fruit bombs. I enjoyed it quite a bit. 16.5+
The 1999 Corton Grand Cru he was really looking forward to showing was ...CORKED
I provided the E&E Black Pepper from 2002. Stored somewhat warm-passive. I liked this wine more than some....It jsut had a lot of different things going on. Some tannins still definitely present-I wasn't able to give it the long decant it needed. Tons of brambly blakberry fruit, black pepper. A very nice mouthfeel. Randy though it was a tad bit disjointed, but it's still pretty young, and I was able to overlook this because of all the interesting, hard to desribe flavors going on. It was certainly not jammy, there was too much refershing acidity and tannins to overwhlem me. I liked this quite a bit! I would rate this 17.5-18 with strong upside potential
The 2002 Paul Hobbs Hyde Vineyard Cabeneret also needed a much longer decant. It showed, at first, the cooler climate character, but toward the end, the wine really knit itself together. Definitely not a fruit bomb, but it didn't have the unique "other" things going on that the Stag's Leap last week did. Could be the decanting?
This seemed to be the consensus favorite, although my heart was stolen by the E&E. 16/20 points.
A very nice wine night!