Optimal Drinking Windows For Recent Vintages of Willamette Valley Pinot Noir

From time to time I pull out well-cellared wines to monitor their development

Let me start off with this iron-clad belief: there is no “best time” to drink any bottle of well-made wine. Of course, saving a special bottle for a special occasion is perfectly fine. But hanging onto a wine anticipating that at some unknown moment in the future it will attain perfection? Good luck with that!

Every vintage is different, every region is different, every producer is different. For that matter every palate is different. If you know for a fact that you love old red wines, fully mature to the point where all the primary and maybe even secondary fruit flavors have faded; well then, hang on to those bottles as long as you like. They won’t turn to vinegar, but they will oxidize and lose all reference points to whatever they started out as.

More likely is that you are someone like myself. I have defined different optimal drinking windows for a number of different types of wine, based on many years of trial and error. In recent years I’ve focused on Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, and it’s been a good run. Starting in 2012 there have been widely varying vintage conditions, but no bad years (with the exception of 2020). Otherwise most wineries made excellent wines in each of the past ten vintages.

So the question is… how are those different years aging out?

I pulled out the three wines pictured above to check in on three of my favorite years: 2015, 2016 and 2018.

It should be noted that all of these wines came directly to me from the wineries and have rested in my temperature-controlled wine cellar ever since. So far, so good. And I chose these vintages not only because they got great reviews right from the start, but because these wineries have proven track records for excellence.

None disappointed. I tasted the three wines repeatedly over 48 hours and all were in what I call prime drinking windows. None were anywhere near losing their core fruit, which is what I most cherish. The aromatics show the most improvement, while any early imbalances (and I’m not saying there were any) have been smoothed away. They represent different AVAs as well as different vintages, so any conclusions must be drawn very generally. But that’s the point of this exercise. Check in, take a reading, see if there are any surprises. Honestly, there were not.

For me now is a great time to drink your 2015s, and I’d give them another half decade before they change significantly. The 2016 vintage produced the most perfectly-structured Pinots of the decade, and as the Winderlea showed, they are just beginning to shed their baby skin. I give this vintage another full decade. The 2018s hardly qualify as old, but most wines from that vintage have had enough bottle age to smooth out any rough edges when first released. If you like youthful wines with plenty of fruit power, drink ‘em soon. I won’t venture a guess on longer term potential for the 2018s other than they remind me a bit of the 2014s, which were gorgeous when released but are already trending quickly toward maturity.

Do you have any thoughts on these vintages (or 2012, 2013, 2014? Post them up here!