Two Barns Farm

Picking begins at Two Barns Farm. This year the 115 leads the pack. Beautiful, cool, weather; we’ll get much more fruit tomorrow!

The Willamette Valley has had a cool growing season this year, and we’re all still waiting for our grapes to ripen. A few people have started picking pinot, but the real action will probably start next week after we get past the predicted rains on the weekend.

In the meantime, we’re always glad to see things like this. The 2005 is spectacular, and it is still available!

From a blog post on Oregon Pinot:

“I scored Two Barns 95 points. It is worthy of being placed in a time capsule to tell future generations of wine-consumers how good we had it in the early 2000s!”

Thanks, but make sure to drink some of it too!

Tony Rynders has decided to do his own thing.

We wish him good luck - he has made fabulous wine from our own fruit, and I’m sure that he will continue to be a major presence in the Oregon wine scene.

Our fruit, in the form of the 2005 Domaine Serene bottling, was highlighted in the April Food & Wine magazine article entitled Finding Oregon’s Finest Pinots.

“… as with several of Rynders’s 2005 wines, such as the promising Two Barns Vineyard bottling, a ripe, sweet Pinot with a wonderful purity of fruit.”

Here is a link to the article, which features a number of very good local winemakers!

Our 2005 fruit has emerged from élevage as spectacularly delicious wine, thanks to Tony Rynders immense skill as a winemaker. Bravo Tony!

Complex, wonderful, wine that really highlights the fruit from this fantastic vintage.

With the exception of 112 chardonnay vines that will be picked for our own barrel next week, Two Barns Vineyard is now officially picked out. This morning the crew moved chard straight onto the flatbed for its trip to the winery, wrapping up our 2007 vintage.

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This morning, we are picking our block of 115, which will be the first Pinot to go to Domaine Serene. We’re off and running, weather is beautiful, and everyone looks happy to be underway. Here’s pix of the first row of fruit to go, on the western end of “le bump.”

I’m off to the winery to clean the fermenters. We will probably start cold soaking fruit tomorrow or the next day!

We’ve (well, “we” in a broad sense - thank you Joel) planted 4 short rows of Riesling right in front of the house for David’s personal winemaking itch.

Brian O’Donnell at Belle Pente, who makes fantastic wine right down the road, has been growing and vinifying delicious Riesling for years. (Not to mention Pinot!) We’re hoping that our own version will have similar flavor characteristics, since it has similar soil, altitude, exposure, and spacing. Until the late 90’s, we had not had the opportunity to taste great Riesling, either European or domestic. Mmm, it can be mighty tasty.

Beth gave me a hard time for featuring only the chardonnay in yesterday’s post, so here is an equally tasteful cheesecake photo of our 115, which Tony tells us is bound for the winery tomorrow.

This cluster is pretty typical this year; you can see that it got cool and wet right around the time that the fruit was setting, so we’ve got lots of size variation. Their flavor is super and you can see that the plant is undergoing senescence, so everything indicates another tasty vintage. Oh, and the long-term weather reports are getting better!