The Cult Pinot Noir
Nobody Has Noticed Yet.

Dear Artisans,

This is the purest wine we have opened all year. What does that mean?

First sip, and I was not in Mountain View any more. Bouquet, flavor and texture all arrived at once and put me in the middle of a forest in the Eola-Amity Hills — wet earth after rain, pine needles underfoot, cold air off the coast range, moss on a log, red fruit still on the bush. Not a wine that reminds you of a place. A wine that immediately puts you in one.

It is fresh, it is ethereal, and there is nothing standing between you and the vineyard. Four hundred and forty-seven cases made for the entire world. Own-rooted vines planted in 1986 in the Eola-Amity Hills, dry-farmed, certified organic, bottled unfined and unfiltered — John Gilman calls it “stunning soil transparency.” Wine Enthusiast finds pine needles and crunched dried oak leaves. We are all describing the same forest.

This is the cheapest thing I will send you all year that I would genuinely call a cult wine.

Decanter gave it ninety-six points and finished the note with five words: “Burgundy, eat your heart out.” Master Sommeliers have poured these blind and had the room call Burgundy. It is a cult wine and almost nobody has noticed yet. That is the entire opportunity.

Russ and Mary Raney founded Evesham Wood in 1986 and planted Le Puits Sec on its own roots. They farmed organically from the early nineties, certified in 2000, and joined the Deep Roots Coalition, whose members pledge never to irrigate.

Erin Nuccio was an East Coast wine retailer who wanted to make the stuff rather than sell it. He went west, did the viticulture degree, worked harvests in California, then landed an apprenticeship under Raney. He started his own label, Haden Fig, in the Evesham cellar in 2007, and when the Raneys retired in 2010 he and his wife Jordan bought the place — He has changed almost nothing.

A Master Sommelier
and the dean of Burgundy critics.

A monumental year for Oregon.
The trade calls it the 2015 with more lift.

2023 is being talked about as one of the finest Pinot Noir vintages in modern Oregon history. A cool spring, a warm summer without heat spikes, and an early-to-mid September harvest ahead of any rain gave winemakers optimally ripe fruit, high natural acidity and full phenolic maturity at the same time. The wines are structured for long ageing yet expressive from the jump.

Erin Nuccio, in his own words: “The 2023 wines have a similar structure to 2015s. This is great, because 2015 was a wonderful vintage with classic, very age-worthy wines. But the 2023s have more lift, by which I mean more jump-out-of-the-glass aromatics and brighter fruit. The layers and complexity of the ’23s are more transparent and the wines overall are more extroverted. I believe the ’23s will follow a similarly rewarding path of the ’15s by ageing gracefully, but they have the bonus of being more expressive early on.”

Evesham Wood
"Le Puits Sec" Pinot Noir 2023

Four reviews on this wine and the lowest of them is ninety-four. What is striking is that all four reach for the same register: elegance, freshness, forest floor, salt, transparency. Nobody uses the words big or rich, because there is nothing big or rich about it — there is only the vineyard, arriving whole.

Decanter also called it a Best Buy. At fifty-five ninety-nine, against Burgundy at three times the money and rising, I would call that an understatement.

While Our 24-Bottle Allocation Lasts

Cult wine,
before anyone else notices.

Four hundred and forty-seven cases exist. We were allocated twenty-four bottles, which is two cases, which is nothing. Four critics, all of them ninety-four or better, and the highest of them ends on “Burgundy, eat your heart out.”

At fifty-five ninety-nine this is the least expensive wine I have written to you about in months and the one I am most confident about. Buy two. Open one this autumn with a roast chicken and put the other one down for five years, because Gilman says it is a long distance runner and he is right.

And if you only take one thing from this letter, take the forest.

Cheers,

— James Tran

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