WTN: Drouhin, Blue Mountain

[Jenise]

With roasted garlic monk fish in a tomato/thyme/butter sauce:

2024 Drouhin Oregon Roserock Pinot Noir Eola-Amity Hills
Very pretty raspberry nose with light green herb. Light loamy earthiness, hint of chocolate, good finish--very Drouhin in style and drinking beautifully now. A bargain at $29, Costco price.

2017 Blue Mountain Pinot Noir River Flow Block 23 Okanagan Valley
Tasted over four days. Last Thursday: was divine on first pour but contrary to expectations fruit and balance faded quickly, becoming overly acidic. Refrigerated the rest, sampled again on Saturday but still too tight. Sampled again Sunday: it's ready, drinks like a cool-climate, cool-vintage pinot, but without regaining all of the wow-ness it had initially on Thursday. Strange performance at nine years out; I would wait a year or three on other bottles if I had them.

That's a new DDO bottling for me, Jenise. Good find! I'm interested that you chose Pinot Noir to go with your monkfish dish. I think I'd be tempted to go with a full-bodied, high acid white with that, something like a demi-sec Chenin, White Burgundy or a Pieropan Soave.

Hmm - I don't like the sound of that Blue Mountain pinot. I have bought a fair bot of their top pinots and chardonnays but haven't drank very many bottles of the pinots yet. Maybe they are better opened in their first 5 years? I'll try to try one soon....

Blue Mountain started making single block Pinots in 2017. They sell Gravel Force Block 14, River Flow Block 23, Wild Terrain Block 09, and market them as having singular characters at a higher price than their regular and reserve bottlings. I haven't started in on mine yet - I split my allocation with Jenise.

I'll have to make a point of opening one with her to see if it shows the same as hers did, and we should likely check out how the other two single vineyard wines are doing as well. FWIW, I have been drinking my reserve 2017 for a bit now and it has shown very decently.

[Jenise]

That's a new DDO bottling for me, Jenise. Good find! I'm interested that you chose Pinot Noir to go with your monkfish dish. I think I'd be tempted to go with a full-bodied, high acid white with that, something like a demi-sec Chenin, White Burgundy or a Pieropan Soave.

And those would work fine, but honestly for the sauce? Pinot noir is a perfect match for tomatoes and thyme. I've added sauteed fennel to the same treatment and paired it with young Cotes du Rhones too. Always surprising to people like Chris and John, who I fed this to, that a red wine match could work so well.

Oh and btw, the bottle itself just says Rose Rock. It's a relatively new acquisition for Drouhin, less than ten years old, that gave them warmer climate than Willamette. Cellar Tracker puts the name Drouhin in front of it but I think it's intended to be a stand-alone label.

I like the Rose Rock wines and they are fairly well priced. But I thought that it was supposed to be cooler climate, not warmer. I remember my friend John talking about the Van Duzer corridor
https://www.willamettewines.com/about-t ... -corridor/

[Jenise]

Dale, as I understand it, Eola-Amity, which is south of Willamette, is near but outside of that windy Corridor. Let me see if I can find a map.

Drouhin says van Duzer makes it 10 degrees cooler than Northern Willamette
https://roserockoregon.com/our-vineyard/

[Jenise]

Wow, so they do! Obviously, I thought the reverse.