The 2006 Pinot Noir Dussin Vineyard (the winery’s estate vineyard planted in 2003) offers aromas of pain grille, earth notes, red and black cherry, and raspberry. Silky, ripe, and layered, the wine has excellent concentration and a lengthy finish. Give it 1-2 years of further bottle age and drink it from 2010 to 2018. Penner-Ash’s 2006 Pinot Noirs are uniformly top-notch, not a surprise given this husband-wife team’s track record. Not to be over-looked, Penner-Ash also produces excellent Riesling, Viognier, and Syrah.www.pennerash.com

Representing her second estate crop, Penner-Ash’s 2006 Pinot Noir Dussin Vineyard delivers sweetly-smoky, tobacco-like scents that collaborate with still-succulent and only lightly-cooked red fruits on a plush, broad palate. A hint of warmth not unusual for the vintage creeps into this wine’s otherwise admirably persistent finish. I would plan on enjoying it soon. Lynn Penner-Ash – who with her husband Ron runs the eponymous winery – designed her recently-constructed Yamhill-Carlton facility (surrounded by the estate’s 15 acre Dussin vineyard) with evident insight and enthusiasm drawn from the same quarter century of technical and practical experience as well as aesthetic sensibility that have made her wines regional icons. Interestingly, Penner-Ash did not include a bottling line in her plans, insisting that the multiple trucks, detail-consciousness, and self-sufficiency that characterize today’s top mobile bottling companies argue in favor of farming-out that finishing touch to those specialists. Penner-Ash taps six principle sites for Pinot (resulting in 5-7 separate bottles); three each for Syrah and Viognier; plus one for Riesling. Her fermentative regimen for Pinot involves 5-7 days of cold soak; a division of lots between spontaneity and inoculation; hand punch-downs as the primary means of extraction; pressing at dryness; and an unusually long settling period of up to a week before juice is let into barrel. Whole clusters and stems are utilized for certain single-vineyard lots in certain vintages (including 2010). This estate bottles certain of their Pinots (but not ones I tasted in their 2010 editions) under the Willamette Valley’s sub-appellations, but their single-vineyard wines are all labeled solely with the Willamette Valley appellation, so I have noted in the text of each applicable tasting note the sub-region in which the vines are located. Penner-Ash is among many Willamette vintners to maintain that what she termed “proactive” and judicious acidulation of musts – based on an analysis of malic acid levels and experience with the fermentative and bottle evolution of Pinot from each individual vineyards – was among the keys to vintage 2010 success. Tel. (503) 554-5545