Wine & Spirits - Winter 2020 - 41

Top 100 Wineries

Walter Scott

Williams Selyem

OREGON | WILLAMETTE VALLEY
Firmly planted in the Eola-Amity Hills, Ken Pahlow and Erika
Landon are two of the great stylists of Oregon pinot noir and
chardonnay.

CALIFORNIA | SONOMA COUNTY
Williams Selyem maps the Russian River Valley and the far coast
with site-expressive pinot noir and zinfandel.

KEN PAHLOW

KEN PAHLOW AND ERIKA LANDON, the husbandand-wife team behind Walter Scott, came to their
own brand on the shoulders of other Oregon
traditionalists: Pahlow worked for many years
with Patricia Green Cellars and St. Innocent as
an assistant winemaker, then helped to manage Evening Land Vineyards at its inception in
the mid-2000s. Landon worked as a sommelier
at Oregon restaurants that boasted deep selections of local wines. At Walter Scott, Pahlow and
Landon set their sights on the Eola-Amity Hills,
the 'island' of hills rising up from the Missoula
ﬂoodplain mid-valley that offers tremendous
geological and climatic diversity in a relatively
small footprint. They make more than a dozen
single-vineyard pinot noirs and chardonnays
from the area, and nearly all of their other bottlings are from vineyards nearby. Pahlow likes
to say that his signature style is no style at all,
that he adjusts his winemaking techniques to
reﬂect the nuances of the vineyard. His wines
are deﬁned by tension, lightness and, usually, an
added textural element-in the chardonnays, a
hint of gunﬂint; in the pinot noirs, the spice of
whole clusters. They're among the most compelling wines in Oregon right now. -P.J.C.

JEFF MANGAHAS

2017 Russian River Valley Rochioli Riverblock
Vineyard Pinot Noir ($85, 96 points) Williams
Selyem's winemaking protocol was built around
Rochioli pinot noir, so it makes sense that a great vintage from Rochioli's prime Riverblock parcel would
produce such a classical Russian River Valley wine.
Nothing gets in the way of the wine's stamina and
depth of ﬂavor, reverberating long after each sip,
identiﬁably Rochioli, transparently Williams Selyem.

2018 Eola-Amity Hills Sojeau Vineyard Pinot Noir
($65, 96 points) High on a ridge facing southwest
into the Van Duzer Corridor winds, Sojeau is planted
on thin basalt soils ("rocky as f***!" says Pahlow). It
produces a haunting wine, with scents of licorice, allspice and tea channeled through vibrant red-cherry
and raspberry ﬂavors. With diaphanous tension, it's a
yin-yang expression of power and delicacy.

FOUNDED:

2008

2018 Eola-Amity Hills Seven Springs Vineyard
Chardonnay ($65, 95 points) This grows at 1.7
acres off the shallow south ridge of Evening Land's
vineyard, where the soils peter out to almost pure
basalt. The wine's heady translucence seduces in
seconds with its savor of bread dough and apple-pie
crust, just a hint of caramelly oak behind the lees
accents. But the texture is gossamer-light, with the
acid-structure and vibrancy to cellar.

OWNERS:

Ken Pahlow &
Erika Landon
WINEMAKER:

Ken Pahlow
ACRES OWNED:

None
ANNUAL
PRODUCTION:

5,500 cases

FOUNDED:

1981
OWNER:

John Dyson
WINEMAKER:

2017 Yorkville Highlands Weir Vineyard Pinot
Noir ($65, 96 points) Based in the hills south of
the Anderson Valley, Bill and Suki Weir planted their
rocky site with cuttings from Mount Eden, as well
as the Wädenswil clone, in 1992. It provides one of
Williams Selyem's most distinctive and, often, most
beautiful wines: It speaks of mountain forests and
coastal desert cold, with brightness to its rose scent
and sumptuous richness to its texture, knitting the
wine's dark fruit and energy together in a ﬂavor that
lasts for minutes.

Jeff Mangahas
VITICULTURISTS:

2018 Eola-Amity Hills X Novo Vineyard Pinot
Noir ($55, 94 points) Walter Scott continues to purchase all of Craig Williams's chardonnay at X Novo
and, with 2018, started to purchase his pinot noir,
as well. The parcel, planted to ﬁfteen clones on 1.3
acres, gives a wine with lean composure, scents of
bramble, cherry and red currant, tobacco leaf and a
whisper of oak. It's destined to be long-lived and complex at every stage of its life.

AFTER TINKERING WITH ZINFANDEL, BURT WILLIAMS and Ed Selyem rented a garage in Fulton
and released their ﬁrst single-vineyard pinot noir
in 1985. They got the fruit from Joe Rochioli, Jr.,
who started growing pinot noir on the banks
of the Russian River in 1968. The awards they
earned with that ﬁrst release lead Williams and
Selyem to seek out other great sites for pinot
noir-and to make all the wines exactly the same
way, hoping to show off their differences. Jeff
Mangahas, who has made the wine here since
2011, learned those protocols from Bob Cabral,
who learned them from Williams: the grapes
foot trod in open-top fermenters (stainless-steel
dairy vats cut in half, lengthwise); the same
strain of local yeast that Williams originally isolated; no pumping, no ﬁltering. "Everything is
normalized," Mangahas says, adding that picking decisions help to highlight the differences
in the range of vineyard designates. A research
biologist before he became a winemaker, Mangahas remains fascinated by the complex distinctions that form the personalities of each of his
wines. -J.G.

John Dyson,
Chris Bowland
ACRES OWNED :
160 (98 planted)
ANNUAL
PRODUCTION:

25,000 cases
ESTATE GROWN:

50%

2017 Russian River Valley Saitone Estate Vineyard Zinfandel ($65, 92 points) Viticulturist John
Dyson, who bought Williams Selyem in 1998, has
been building the zinfandel program with winemaker
Jeff Mangahas, adding Antonio Saitone's circa1895 vineyard to the estate in 2016. Interplanted
with a host of other varieties, these ancient zin
vines produced a brisk 2017, with plenty of acidity
to tighten around the plump fruit, warm, spicy and
mineral-driven.
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