I saw Jesus, who turned water into wine. Really.
Picture a hard rainfall, at White Rose, somewhere SW of Dundee, OR. You're standing in a barn, surrounded by wine barrels. The double door is open, and the rain is sheeting down, obscuring the vineyards into a kind of twilight promise of phantom vines. You're grateful for the shelter. The light is dim. An air of surrealism pervades the place. If the Pillsboro Doughboy waltzed out from behind the barrels, it somehow wouldn't surprise you in the slightest.
Before you are two Hispanic brothers and a table with some wines on it. Spartan. Fitting. The younger brother, eager, talkative, knowledgeable, is handling sales, and the older one, taciturn, leaning back on the door jamb, watching you, is the winemaker. Through a fluke of tour bus dynamics and unknowable universal humanoid allocation principles, no one else is there. It's a planet of eight billion, and yet there are only the three of you. The rain beats out a winetasting dance. You sample the wines, all Pinots, ranging from $30 to $75. Some are forgettable, some are very good. It's clear from the conversations that the older brother, the winemaker, knows his stuff--it is fitting that he rose from field hand to chief winemaker in less than ten years. You love America, that it can provide such opportunities. Looking into your glass, you wonder where this winemaker grew up, how he came here. Which is more mysterious: the wine, or the winemaker?
Then, the winemaker, having sized you up as a person who understands something about Oregon Pinot, offers to pour you his own personal wine--he's the winemaker for all the wines at White Rose, but the owner has kindly allowed him to select from the best fruit and make a few cases all his own. So he brings out a bottle with a different label, "Dreamcatcher," with Native American art on it. It's got 2007 Vista Hills Vineyard fruit, which reached 23.5Brix at 800' elevation, a neat trick for grapes growing so high. This vineyard is right next to Domaine Drouhin and Domaine Serene, so you're in God's Country for Pinot.
The bouquet is unmistakable Oregon Pinot, but it's subtle--you want to keep smelling it, and each time it rewards you with something new: rose petals, licorice, black currants. It's like a time-release nosegasm. In the mouth, it's excellent, redolent of black fruits, very light on the oak--very balanced. The guys said it was bottled in Jan 2009, and would develop more complex flavors after another year or two in bottle. I believe that.
The best part? This little under-the-table gem is the least expensive of all the White Rose offerings.
I stress that this is a fleeting opportunity. He made hardly any of this stuff. If you open this wine, a year from now, for your very best friends, you can be assured that (a) they will not have had this anywhere else, and (b) they will love this wine. And each bottle is signed in gold ink by the man who truly turns water into wine: Jesus (as in, "Hey! Dr. Suess!")
What's special about White Rose is that they've got some of the oldest Pinot noir vines in Oregon--about 35-40 years old. And they limit crop to as low as one ton per acre. That allows supreme concentration in the fruit.
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