What's Pressoir Drinking? A Visit to Beaux Frères
by Raj Vaidya
September 5, 2023
I had occasion to visit some wineries in the Willamette Valley in Oregon last week. One of the great surprises I was treated to was my first visit to the storied Beaux Frères estate in Newburgh, located in the Ribbon Ridge district of the Chehalem Mountains.
Ribbon Ridge has a very typical soil mix for the region, a base of basalt derived from ancient, underground lava flows that originated in the mid-west, in addition to some schist, sand and gravel. This mix of soils with a sandy texture, coupled with the absence of phylloxera in the early days of the wine region led to a lot of ungrafted vine plantings. At Beaux Frères there are still quite a few ungrafted plants dating back to the estate’s origins in the late 80’s. Phylloxera has since arrived, and so more recently planted blocks and some individual plants have been planted after grafting on American rootstock.
Mike Etzel founded the winery starting in 1986 with the help of his sister Pat and her husband, famed wine critic Robert Parker. It took a few years to plant the vineyard, during which years Mike worked harvests at the Ponzi winery and bought grapes to make the first few releases from Beaux Frères, finally bottling the first estate wines in the 1991 vintage.
Mike had a fairly heavy hand with wine making, lots of oak, extraction, power and while there was no lack of fine-ness, the overall profile of the wines was rich and powerful. Very much in line with Bob Parker’s preference for a fairly rich, extracted and opulent style of wine! Mike retired in the later part of the last decade when the Bouchard and Henriot family took a controlling interest in the winery, their first acquisition in the US. This allowed Mike’s son Mikey to step up into the role of winemaker. Mikey’s approach is somewhat different than his dad’s - the wines have definitely moved in the direction of more balance, less oak, less alcohol and extraction. The winery was recently acquired by Artemis Domaines, and as result there is a renewed energy at the estate, viewing this I was super impressed! At the end of tasting of young vintages, 2018 to 2021, all of which showed greater finesse, we tasted a couple of delicious oddities that surprised me.
The ‘Rogue’ Chardonnay is a bottling of co-planted Chardonnay vines that were accidentally planted along and amidst the Pinot Noir planted back in 1988. Every harvest the team combs through the vineyard prior to picking the Pinot and isolates these vines for an early pick, always producing a lean expression of high altitude Chardonnay. This bottle was super delicious!
After we had tasted many of the wines that Mikey had made, our conversation drifted to his father’s era, and to Bob Parker’s palate. I’ve always had a tremendous amount of respect for Bob, truly one of the greats, a legend in the industry, but for sure I’ve noted that his favorite expressions of Pinot Noir often seemed too heavy for my tastes. That had long been my impression of the wines of Beaux Frères (I should note, given his fiscal involvement, Bob did not rate this estate’s wines) and Mikey jumped at the opportunity to open another bottle, and to prove me wrong. The 2010 vintage showed evidence of some structure and richness which surely came from a ripe pick date and some robust oak, but now, with 12+ years in the bottle, the wine showed beautifully, seamless in texture and very fine. Aromatically the wine was phenomenal, amazing aromas of spice and smoke with some delightfuly, brambly red currant notes. Very long on the palate. I was very pleasantly surprised at how fine the tannins were, which just goes to show, if a Pinot Noir seems a bit burly in its youth, the answer is to let it age!