Hiyu Tzum Smock Shop Band Pinot Noir 2020

Where: Hood River County, Oregon - Columbia Gorge Valley
Grapes: Pinot Noir
Body: Medium
Category: Red Wine

Hiyu is winemaker, Nate Ready, a former master sommelier in various fine establishments, including the lauded Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in Napa Valley and his partner, China Tresemer, the estate’s co-founder and agriculturalist. She is also a talented illustrator who paints all of the labels.

Smockshop Band is always an experimental cuvée. Each year Nate and crew take on the challenge of making a wine in a way they never have. While wines from Tzum and Hiyu are bottled from small, distinct fields within vineyards, Smockshop Band wines are blends of grapes from different sites, and envisioned as accessible introductions to the beauty of the Columbia Gorge.

Nate on this wine: 

Making of: This is a blend of eight barrels from all three of the parcels where we grow Pinot Noir: Oak Ridge, Elder, and Hiyu. It was fermented entirely with whole clusters in open top conical wood vats, tread by foot, pressed in a basket press, and aged for two years on the lees in old barriques. 

Personality: Strawberry brick in color, black raspberry, burnished leather, and flamboyant dark spices on the palate. “While other Pinot Noir based wines that we make tend to be made as ephemeral, delicate infusions, this is closer to a traditionally styled wine. This feels closest to a Gevrey-Chambertin from an old-fashioned producer like Alain Burguet or Joseph Roty. The wine is extremely dense and meaty without losing any sense of varietal purity. It speaks to one of our original questions: what would happen if the elder statesman of the winemaking world were to appear in the Hood River Valley to vinify and age a vintage. What would be possible? What would it taste like? The wine is impossibly spicy. Culture: A glass shared in the shade of the barn after a morning in the fields.

ORGANIC  //  no Sulfites Added // Woman Owner // Vegan

2022  //  750ml  // ABV 12.5%