Patricia Green Cellars "Dollar Bills Only" Pinot Noir 08
The Patty Green Dollar Bills Only 08 is definitely a crowd pleaser, but also a wine that a europhile palate wouldn't snub for the money.
The first hit on this wine is a sweet, toasty earthiness with some notes of morel mushrooms in the background. It opens up to loads of black berry and black cherry, with some floral notes hinting at cherry blossom, but also a lot of sweet orange and spice and a touch of cocoa powder.
The texture is creamy, and tastes of mixed berry pie filling and cinnamon sticks, again with that natural sweetness. The finish is long and reminds me of a raspberry/blackberry marmalade with a nice touch of thyme and oregano thrown in.
Overall this wine made me think of Christmas, with the orange, cinnamon, and pie filling flavors, and always that pinot sweetness. - Adrienne
This is our second label Pinot Noir. Over the past we have bottled this erratically. In 2006 we chose not to use this label at all. In 2002 and 2007 we bottled a few hundred cases. Basically this has been something that has bounced around a lot.
Since discontinuing our “Oregon” Pinot Noir bottling we have been re-thinking what our approach should be with our non-single vineyard and reserve Pinot Noir wines. At this point we have settled on producing a decent quantity of this wine. This allows us to create a wine that is good, comes from a variety of vineyard sources and ultimately strengthens our entire line-up of Pinots by ensuring that wines that don’t have particular distinctiveness of site (terroir) but are still of good quality have a bottling to go into.
In 2008 we took wines from the following vineyards to create what we believe is one of the best sub-$20 Pinot Noirs made inAmerica.
10% Bradley Vineyard: A 24 year-old Pommard clone vineyard at the south end of the Willamette Valley
5% Four Winds Vineyard, Block 3: A 15 year-old section of Pommard from one of our long-standing single vineyard sites located in the McMinnville appellation.
8% Four Winds Vineyard, Blocks 4 & 7: Two 7 year-old Dijon clone blocks.
13% Eason Vineyard, original planting: From parts of this Dundee Hill based Pommard clone vineyard that was planted in 1985 and that we have worked with since 1994.
3% Eason Vineyard, young vines: We planted this part of the site in 2003.
14% Cattrall Vineyard: 25 year-old LIVE certified organic Wadnesvil clone Pinot from the Amity Hills.
15% Croft-Williamson Vineyard, Dijon 115 block: 16-year old LIVE certified Pinot from just outside of the Eola Hills appellation.
10% Croft-Williamson Vineyard, Pommard block: 15-year old LIVE certified Pinot.
15% Estate Vineyard, Grapes of Mirth Block: 9 year-old planting of Pommard from our property.
7% Estate Vineyard, Dijon 777 block: 9 year-old planting on our property.
These are quality vineyard sites. We manage two of them and managed another (Four Winds) up through the 2006 vintage. Another two sites are farmed organically. We have been working with fruits from these sites, in general, for many vintages. So this isn’t some dumping ground of low quality fruit and poor wine. While not as intentionally planned as the wines that carry the Patricia Green Cellars label this wine is far from being the place where bad wines go to die. Far from it.
This is no thin, wimpy Pinot. This is darkly pigmented, red and black fruited, surprisingly structured Pinot Noir. Will it provide you with the sense of place that our other wines do? No. Well, it does have an Oregon Pinot Noir quality to it so in a broader sense of place it does qualify.
What can you expect from this wine? Lots of dark sumptuous fruit, which is the hallmark of the 2008 vintage. This is no simple jam bomb. There is an undertone of earth, plenty of spice and a very nice balance of soft acidity and fine tannins. The wine has excellent texture and while not shockingly complex it is not so simple that it is boring.
To the annoyance of our accountant we have tried to run our winery like the wine lovers and wine buyers that we are rather than purely as sellers of wine. We know the world has been a funky place over the past year. We want people to keep drinking Oregon Pinot Noir and we want people to have alternatives at lots of different price points. Pinot Noir has never been cheap or easy to produce and we aren’t able to offer wines that cost $6 that you see stacked up in grocery stores and still stay in business. However, folks that love Pinot Noir tend to know that this is the reality of this particular grape.
So, it’s serious Pinot Noir at a less than serious Pinot Noir price. It’s good stuff.
Patty and Jim were sitting at Lumpy's Tavern one night with beer and burgers, talking about their new, value Pinot. At a loss for a name, staring at the jukebox across from them, they noticed a sign: "Dollar Bills Only". "There's the name!" they chortled, and Dollar Bills Only Pinot noir was born.
The label is a photo of the jukebox at Lumpy's Tavern.
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