Lucky me. Some fine St. Innocent wines with Mark Vlossak and dinner by James Beard award winner Ashley Christensen (Best Chef Southeast 2014). She now has six restaurants and a liquor bar in Raleigh and this dinner was held at the Bridge Club, a second floor restaurant and event venue above her restaurant Death & Taxes which is nominated for the 2016 James Beard Awards as Best New Restaurant. Death & Taxes specializes in cooking by wood fire and the smells were quite enticing as we waited downstairs for the go ahead to ascend to the Bridge Club. (I stayed in Raleigh overnight and ate breakfast the next day at Ashley's coffee shop Joule.)
We started with passed hors d'oeuvres and a St. Innocent Pinot Blanc. There was a pea mousse on toast bites, mini-mini tuna tartare tacos, and a pate bite. I especially liked the tuna appetizer. Mark Vlossak explained about the Pinot Blanc grape being a mutation from Pinot Noir. The nose was more delicate than apple--perhaps pear or quince. It had a stony component and some white pepper notes.
Course One was poached shrimp with avocado, fava beans, thin radish slices, and spring herb fromage blanc. The wine was 2014 Chardonnay, Freedom Hill Vineyard. The Chardonnay was pungent on the nose and presented as both rich tasting and delicate at the same time. Natural fermentation; non-fined. The Freedom Hill Vineyard is on the oldest sedimentary soil in Oregon with some semblance to the soil in Chablis. The wine goes into older neutral barrels. Rather lengthy finish on this wine. Very reasonably priced at $27. Mark describes it as "distinctive."
Course Two was Raviolo with duck sugo and charred ramp. It included ricotta cheese, goose egg and duck egg, sea salt, and shallots. It was paired with two 2013 St. Innocent Pinot Noirs.
2013 Pinot Noir Temperance Hill Vineyard, $38. 12.5% abv. Soft cherry flavors with a medium finish. Spicier than the Freedom Hill.
2013 Pinot Noir Freedom Hill Vineyard, $40. 13% abv. Deeper, earthier than the Temperance Hill. Beautiful on the nose and palate. Red fruits in a nicely balanced, elegant Pinot Noir. My favorite wine of the evening and I bought two bottles to take home.
Course Three was dry-aged short rib with roasted tomato tart and melted kale.
2013 Pinot Noir Momtazi Vineyard, $42. This seemed a little on the heavy side to me after the previous two Pinots and I didn't take notes on it but it stood up to the beef dish.
Dessert was Crème fraiche cheesecake with rhubarb-Riesling marmalade and a delicious bottom crust of ? (brown sugar caramelized, maybe some ground nuts?) The crust was the favorite part of the dessert for me and for Joann (not sure how she spells her name) sitting next to me.
Mark is definitely passionate about winemaking. He told us some about his background and how his Hungarian father with Alsace connection let him start sampling wine at the age of seven. He developed his palate early under his father's tutelage. His father was one of the first certified members of the Society of Wine Educators. Mark is from Wisconsin and moved to Oregon in 1980. He started making wine in 1988. His father was born on St. Innocent's Day and Innocent was his middle name so the winery was named for St. Innocent. Mark stressed that he is more interested in the texture and feel of a wine rather than what fruit or spices or minerals he tastes in the wine. It is also important how the wine interacts with what you are eating. Ashley's pairings were excellent for the wines at this dinner. Mark strives to make complicated wines that are very broad, very textured with a lot of balance. The 2013 vintage saw eleven days of drizzle in a row at the wrong time (including 4 1/2" of rain in 48 hours with high winds) but St. Innocent held off on picking the grapes, and the rain was followed with three weeks of nice weather. Because it was cloudy, the sugars and alcohol didn't go up drastically. The wines came in at 12.5% or 13% rather than the normal 13.5% to 14.5%.
Temperance Hill Vineyard is very high and never very warm. Mark likes the wine with a simple grilled meat or salmon. The Freedom Hill Pinot Noir is bigger and more structured. Momtazi is a very stressed vineyard near Pacific Ocean at very high altitude and very exposed. The soil is thin and the ground is steep and makes picking the grapes difficult. The wine speaks of black or blue fruit and the spices are savory rather than sweet like nutmeg or cinnamon.
St. Innocent usually produces 9,000 to 10,000 cases of wine but in 2014 produced 13,000. The tasting room is open daily and has a patio and visitors can picnic on the patio in good weather. It is in the Eola-Amity Hills region closer to Salem, Oregon than to McMinnville.
Lovely evening!