Singular US Pinot Noir: 20 vineyards where the variety has found a home

The concept of a single vineyard that stands above its peers dates all the way back to Roman times.

The vineyards on Mount Falernus – now known as Monte Massico and situated near Campania’s northern border with Lazio – were even designated into separate growths, or ‘crus’ in today’s terminology.

Such was their reputation that these Falernian wines were mentioned by the poet Horace and in the 1st-century work of Latin fiction Satyricon.

No place has shaped the concept of vineyard expression, however, like Burgundy, where the clos system developed as stone walls were built to protect exceptional vineyards, closing them off from access to animals or passersby (clos as an adjective meaning literally ‘enclosed’).

The first such site, Clos de Vougeot, was established in 1336, in the heart of the vines just outside the village of Vougeot in Burgundy’s Côte de Nuits.

America took a while to come around.

Scroll down for notes and scores of 20 excellent, single-vineyard US Pinot Noirs

Burgundian inspiration

With the 1966 bottling of Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa’s Heitz Cellars released the first wine in the US to specify a vineyard on its label.

These days, with the development of American wine, the concept of place is paramount – those Burgundians were on to something, as no grape seems to show where it’s from the way Pinot Noir does.

‘Pinot Noir is a great storyteller,’ says Marcus Goodfellow of Oregon’s Goodfellow Family Cellars. ‘It shows you everything: the vineyard, certainly, the clone and even how warm our fermentation was. Its transparency can be a blessing and a curse.

The hand of nature

With that, many of America’s great Pinot Noirs are vineyard- or block-designate wines (specifying the source).

These allow winemakers to celebrate a particular set of growing conditions that make for a unique wine that stands alone as a snapshot in time – a picture of a vintage and a very particular place.

Familiarity with a place allows winemakers to further understand what a site gives their wines and how they can learn either to shepherd that process or get out of the way.

‘I think a lot of intuition comes from experiencing seasons within a vineyard from start to finish,’ says Jason Drew of Drew Family Cellars in Mendocino, California.

‘That’s one of the things about living on the property where we’re growing grapes and making wine. You become so in tune with the weather and how a given vintage will impact the wines from this place.’

Whereas blending allows a winemaker to enhance or conceal a wine’s traits, a single-vineyard bottling is an unadorned display of a singular expression.

‘Mother nature is going to win every time,’ says Ernest Vineyards’ winemaker Joseph Ryan. ‘And so there’s a lot of humility. You have to embrace the chaos and the variability, because that’s the only way you’ll make a wine like this.’

‘A single-vineyard wine is about transporting someone,’ says Tracy Kendall, one half of Folly of Man in Willamette Valley, Oregon. ‘It’s as if your feet are in the soil. You’re experiencing the wind that created the tannin structure, the volcanic soil that built a sort of softer mouthfeel, the elegance of that and the red, purple and blue fruits.

‘It’s about experiencing something wholly unique.’

20 excellent, single-vineyard US Pinot Noirs

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