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The September 2022 Auction: Part 4

Auction # 729 | View Auction Schedule and Details
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Auction Ends: 9/22/2022 6:00:00 PM PDT

Lot #1479. Ayoub Estate Pinot Noir 2006

Description: Consists of 1 Bottle, 0.75L
Score: 92 WA.
“The Ayoub 2006 Pinot Noir Estate manages despite the extremely warm and dehydrating character of its growing season to project ample primary juiciness of dark berries and to stay just shy of 14% alcohol. Ayoub notes that this admirable balance, while in part attributable to the elevation and eastern exposure of this site, is to a significant degree due to nature’s high-yielding intentions being fulfilled despite considerable crop-dropping. In the end, there were 500 cases of this, nearly twice the vineyard’s average and well more than double the volume of 2005 – a striking reminder that high yields can, at times, be a blessing. This delivers lightly cooked yet juicy red raspberry – concentrated, but without ungainly tannins – accompanied by pungent overtones of sweat, game, incense, and alkali. The intriguing complexity on offer here is incontrovertible, even if it might not be everybody’s cup of Pinot, and the sheer finishing length on display is similarly undeniable. I met Mo Ayoub this year at his four-acre property of dozen year-old, clonally diverse vines (dry-farmed since 2005) high in the Dundee Hills, and the array of wines I tasted – including two older vintages for the first time; several for the second; and stunning collections from 2011 and, in barrel, 2012 – left me in no doubt that his fanaticism is paying off in some of the most exciting wines produced anywhere in North America not to mention the Willamette Valley. ‘Paying off’ might, though, have been a painfully poor choice of words, because taking the aforementioned fanaticism and the low yields, extreme selectivity, and labor intensiveness it implies together with the prices Ayoub asks (wishing to retain a perhaps equally fanatic devotion among his clients), it’s clear he can’t be putting much, if anything, on the bottom line. In fact, any returns are presumably what he’s plowing into a significant expansion of the tiny cellar attached to his house as well into securing the option and then planting – with Chardonnay as well as Pinot – a new, impressively situated site near (and larger than) his existing estate, a spot that it’s amazing could have remained unplanted until now. (Possibly the steepness deterred potential farmers.) All this, plus – as noted in my extended introductory notes for Issue 202 – Ayoub still makes his living as an engineer in California. It awes and exhausts (as well as worries) me just thinking about him, and I hope he can soon devote his attentions entirely to his calling as a vintner. When he testifies: ‘I never worked by butt off harder than in 2011,’ I’m exhausted just thinking about what that might, coming from his lips, imply. By Ayoub’s reckoning, the skins were thinner not to mention more disease-prone than in 2010. Even after stringent selection of what made it to the fermenter, he was still left with two barrels of Pinot that he rejected for his ‘Memoirs’ blend. AI have no idea what I’m going to do with them yet,’ he said. ‘Probably it’ll be like 2007 when I ended up pitching two down the drain.’ Most of the 2011 musts were chaptalized to arrive at around 13% finished alcohol. As usual here, the fruit underwent close to a week of cold soak; and fermentation temperatures were kept on the low side. Both whites and reds were bottled already in September, 2012. The amicable but redoubtable Robert Brittan, incidentally, continues to offer Ayoub consultation.” David Schildknecht, Wine Advocate #209, Oct 2013
Provenance: The Nantais Cellar
Lot Location: Orange County
Estimate: $30

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