Savvy wine lovers know the Pinot Noirs from Zena Crown Vineyard, one of the most exciting sites in Willamette ValleyThis is Eola-Amity Hills. The winery produces Pinot Noir beloved by critics and collectors from its namesake vineyard and is also a source of fruit for well-known brands such as Gran MorainePenner Ash, Beaux Frères and Hamilton Russell. After much anticipation, Zena Crown Vineyard has launched its first Chardonnay2021 Desiderium, and it lives up to the vineyard’s reds.
Winemaker Shane Moore planted for the first time Chardonnay vines here in 2014, and even after they matured, it took several attempts to get there before finding a wine the team thought was worthy of the Zena Crown Vineyard name on the bottle. “Often I find Chardonnay from young vines, all fruity, lacking depth and complexity,” says Moore, explaining the longer-than-expected wait for this wine. While it was ready to produce a small quantity of Chardonnay in 2020, the Labor Day fire in the Center Oregon The waterfalls caused the wine to smell of smoke. “We decided to launch that year and make 2021 our first release,” he says.
Anyone familiar with Burgundy knows that soils and climatic conditions favorable for Pinot Noir can also be ideal for Chardonnay, and Zena Crown is no exception, offering a cool climate that oscillates between maritime and Mediterranean. Moore points to “the amount of refreshing summer wind from Goldilocks in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA” as being just enough to maintain coolness and acidity as well as “old soils based on low productivity volcanic basalt” as factors that add to the perfect environment. Desiderium is defined as “a desire or longing.” Moore explains that during his long, bucolic drives on winding country roads to and from work each day for the past 11 years, he contemplated the terroir of Zena Crown and what its expression of Chardonnay would be before choosing the name.
Desiderium spends 17 months in oak barrels with primary fermentation using only indigenous yeasts, it then undergoes secondary malolactic fermentation and finally it benefits from a barrel rest period before being transferred to stainless steel tanks for further six months of maturation. The wine was bottled in May 2023 and then underwent additional bottle aging before release. Zena Crown Vineyard 2021 Desiderium Chardonnay is medium in color to the eye and has aromas of lemon curd, Bartlett pear and freesia. It has a sweet entry with flavors of lemon meringue pie, vanilla, Meyer lemon zest, chalk and kumquat with a lively touch of acidity on the long finish.
Moore is a big fan of aging in the bottle before sending the wine to market. “Generally, I find that our wines don’t start to open up until at least a year in the bottle,” he says. “Even though some people may conceive of a 2021 Chardonnay as being old for marketing, I wonder why they are in such a hurry. » We agree with Shane; In our opinion, this one was definitely worth the wait.