What's Your Favorite Oregon Vintage?

Last weekend we poured our 2005, 2006 and 2007 reserve Pinot Noirs at our Weekend Before event [Note: There are two traditional open house weekends in Oregon - the weekend after Thanksgiving and Memorial Day Weekend. Every winery including all those without regular tasting hours pour wine during those two weekends and many are also open the weekend before.]

I was interested in what people thought about those three vintages and I have almost the perfect setup for finding out. All three wines had the same clone percentages: 50% Pommard, 25% Wadenswil, and 25% 115. All three wines were aged for about the same amount of time in 50% new French oak [50% means half of the barrels were new]. And even the winemaking was almost identical - every vintage was completely destemmed and fermented in small lots in 1.5 ton fermenters.

So as I told the tasters, the variables were mostly yield and weather. We had a bad fruit set in the spring of 05, so our yield that year was very low. We had a normal crop going in 06 and then it got hot in October (the 09 harvest reminds us a lot of 06). And in 07 we had a normal crop going and then it got cool in late September with some rain.

So which one did people prefer? If you look at purchased bottles, it was 56% 06, 22% 05 and 22% 07. There did seem to be some differences in preference among people who have purchased Oregon Pinot for many years - they seemed to prefer the 07 over the 06. If you remember (and we certainly do) the "experts" were trashing the 07 vintage before we even picked it because it rained in late September. The wines are really coming around now and showing quite nicely.

I was asked quite a bit which one is my favorite and I responded by stating the order in which I'd drink them right now. I'd drink the 07 first (nice acidity with a beautiful laser beam of cherry fruit running through the wine - very refreshing), the 06 second (definite crowd pleaser with upfront dark fruit flavors and a tremendous round mouthfeel) just because I think it could benefit from another year or two of aging, and the 05 third (still very tight but showing more fruit this year) because I think that needs another couple of years.

I'll get another couple of hundred opinions this upcoming weekend and update this post if I find anything interesting.