2003 Cameron "Arley's Leap" Pinot Noir

It’s got tart berry fruit. That alone should be enough to sell you. I want to walk into my next job interview and say just that. Nothing with tart berry fruit can be resisted. But what sort of fruit you might ask? Pinor Noir grapes. This wine is 100% grape juice. The thing that makes it different from other wines, also made from grapes, is that the constituent fruit here was grown in a particular place and fashioned into wine by a particular person.

His name is John Paul and I either love or hate his wines, the way a father might love or hate a son’s actions. When the wines are bad I have no problem saying so, despite the stomach-wrenching and emotional quandaries I might feel the night before. When the wines are right, they are the best the world has ever seen, are going to Harvard and will one day be a doctor. The funny thing about that last sentence is I am contradicting myself from last year’s perspective on this wine. Funny how memory works, I just dug through old emails and found this, along with many skeletons:
Notes on Arley’s (2002):

What do I mean when I say a wine reeks? A couple of things, some good, some bad. Talking about John Paul’s (AKA Cameron’s) wine I definitely mean the former. This wine stinks like cheese, basements and nasty mean old barrels where the wine has been laying in wait for you. Alcohol storms your nose, retreats, and then forms a healthy alliance with all that is right in world of Oregon wine. These wines smell like roses, violets, bails of hay before they’re taken back to the barn and simple old black tea. His wines have class, but they speak like they went to an Ivy League college and then said no. Hello, my name is and I went to school with the heir apparent to the Saudi throne, and though you are the father he might wish to secede, and your offer of a weekend at the palace is generous, I have some time to spend on my own. No easy ride, no coasting. No professing to be great, just being great. No falling back on anyone else’s vision.

Like few humans, let alone wines, Cameron’s wines have noble and thirsty roots, but humble visions: they only want to speak for themselves. Cameron’s wines reek of Oregon, not just the place, but also the people. Maybe it’s the New Englander deep down in me, but these wines encapsulate manifest destiny, not by simply being great because the great father of wine says they should be, but in struggling and striving to actually come to terms with where they are made and what they can become. So many times people in the Oregon wine business speak of their product as being Burgundian. Trying to spin us around and make us believe we’re getting a good deal on a sidewalk Rolex. This wine is Oregonian and tastes like Pinot. Some people might be able to sit around and debate which slope in Burgundy it is familiar to. Familiarity has a close relationship to proximity, and with this wine open next to me, I want it to be a part of my home, my day and my life. Drinking wine that comes from where you live, you want the wine to speak like you might, be it on a good or bad day. For what it’s worth:

Good bright acid rounds out the finish, creamy strawberry and bitter cherry fruit on the mid-palate, a mouth-feel that comforts and beguiles at the same time. Alcohol? Alcohol, but alcohol that depends on the time the bottle has been open, and how your mouth has been treated that day. It’s named after a dog, has a dog on the label and what, do you hate dogs? I’ll admit I sometimes hate tasting notes.

So, what up with tart berry fruit? I’m sitting in the middle of the Reed College canyon, ducks quacking, spiders spidering, dog being so well behaved I can’t believe it. This started with a ¼ bottle of Arley’s next to me, the intention to taste and look and kill time. Instead I find myself in Oregon, truly, for the first time since I’ve been back. Tears well, the sun sets, memory flows over me like I owned some land.

I still taste the same barrels, perhaps a little older, as I did in the previous vintage. Maybe that’s not true, and what I have come to associate with barrels is really the cellar, the place, the yeast, the flaws. Whatever the case, my jeans smell like dirty dishes, the same way they did years ago when I got interested in this food and wine thing. A heron flies by, a duplex framed under the tent of its wings, ambulances, moving some 2 and a half blocks away, sound.

It has persistent acidity.

This wine, and many other things, makes me want to survive here. I want this to be my home. What would that entail? Polishing the few things that each of us has: character, nerve, intelligence and balance. I learned something about each of these with this bottle.

This is a wine from a different year, but definitely the same place. It is harvest wine, it is day of the dead wine. Ghosts move through it like they do any place worth haunting. Here is something worth drinking.