Brandy of Pinot Noir
$75 per bottle (No Discounts) (375 ML bottles only)/4 bottle per customer limit
Available for pick-up at the winery. Shipping to DC, CT and OR only at this point. Please call winery for shipping.
This is the straight brandy that was distilled from our 2020 Pinot Noirs that were so smoke tainted that they were undrinkable. A great deal of our wine was severely impacted and by the end of harvest we found ourselves with around 12,000 gallons of Pinot Noir that was absolutely unsellable due to the bitterness that the smoke taint causes. A friend who is the winemaker for a different winery told us he was distilling some of his ruined wine into brandy at a distillery here in Oregon. He said they sent over a few hundred gallons of their ruined wine to give distilling it into brandy a shot. We went over shortly thereafter and tasted said brandy. It was absolutely horrible. So, that idea seemed to be right out the window.
However, a couple of weeks later when I was at my partner’s winery, Kelley Fox Wines, I met a woman who was doing some work for her named Lynsee Sardell who is a distiller. I told her the story outlined above and she said, “You should let me try.” Given that we were sitting on a pile of what seemed to be garbage I was more than happy to let her give it a go. She came back a week or so later with some samples of brandy from our distilled wine and it was amazing. Clean, rich, pure and with no hint of the smoke taint. I said, “I sort of thought distilling was putting stuff into a still and letting it do its thing and then a much smaller amount of high alcohol stuff came out at the end. Now I know that you’re good at distilling and that other place, well, not so much.”
Brandy is often times seen as something that little old ladies sneak into their coffee. However, Cognac is the distillation of a wine grape known as Ugni Blanc. Cognac, much like Champagne, is a region in France and not a beverage in and of itself. That is what we are basing our Brandy of Pinot Noir upon. High end cognac should have a richness of texture, sweetness on the palate born of the nature of the grape still resounding in the completely dry finished liquid as well as the barrels’ imparting their notes and enough heat from the alcohol that the whole package comes off as rich and satisfying. We think we have that here. We also wanted to show that all evidence of smoke taint was removed in this distillation process and that this brandy is both wonderful on its own and is an incredible addition of textural nuance to the grain distillates with which it teams to make our unique and uniquely Oregon whiskeys.
Just 2 barrels of this were used for this bottling. The distillate came out of the still at 155 proof. It was watered back to around 115 proof to go into barrel. It was subsequently watered to 100 proof just before bottling.
57 cases bottled all in 375 ML bottles.
