release notes

2021 Vintage | 2020 Vintage Fall Release | Rose Vertical Release | 2019 Spring Release | 2019 Fall Release | 2018 Release Part Deux | 2018 Fall Release | 2018 Spring Release | 2017 Fall Release | 2017 Spring Release | 2016 Inaugural Release

2021 Vintage Notes

Two thousand twenty-one could have possessed any combination of a wide range of challenges not smoke related and all our winemaking friends would have dropped to their knees and thanked the stars. To have lost something so precious the year before, one of a finite number of vintages in a life, was devastating. To have it followed by what I’ll term to be a neo-classically perfect vintage felt like a balancing of universal fates. Our valley’s classic cool nights anchored the vines as they worked. There was heat, concentrated, record breaking heat, yes, but this is the new world and we’ve spent the last decade and more listening and learning. We farm through a more sensitive lens, we make wiser, more forward thinking decisions in the winery. We work at elevation near the cool air of forests, on east facing slopes just for summers like this one. When the wines became clear in the cellar we saw a shimmering intensity, catching the light from every angle. Luxurious and fine, destined for long life, but brimming with an infectious joy on day one. An ode to sunshine yes, but to forests who drink the rain deeply as well, if this is the new way, lead on.

Spring Release - March, 2024

Our Spring 2024 offering consists of the two final Pinot Noirs from the 2021 vintage, our Audeant cuvee and Nysa vineyard bottlings as well as the ever popular, 2022 Rosé. 

The 2021 Audeant Pinot Noir continues to be the bellwether of our cellar, coming together on the blending table to reflect vintage and a wide lens view of the Willamette Valley, curated by our beliefs. The sun shown and fruit abounds, but those in search of the more ethereal brooding qualities of Oregon Pinot Noir will want this in their cellar as the years peel back the layers here. In this vintage we added a new vineyard source. Cortell-Rose vineyard is situated in the tenderloin of the East facing slope of the Eola-Amity Hills, owned and tended by the famed Jessica Cortell who farms many great sites throughout the Valley. The fruit from this vineyard has seamlessly joined the chorus here, with its vibrant delicate and deeply fruited voice. For now this wine will remain available on our website outside of the allocation for purchase. 481 cases produced. 

2021 is our sixth vintage working with fruit from the Nysa vineyard. That intimacy leads, every year, to a deeper and more refined understanding of how best to revere the fruit we are blessed with. This vintage presented us with a unique opportunity to co-ferment every clone planted here in one concrete fermenter. The resultant strata of bright red to blue hued fruit lays densely atop the vineyard’s typical core of iron mineral earth and saturating spice. Again this vintage is one to have in the cellar for years to come. We are incredibly proud of the 110 cases bottled of this wine. Although just now being released, The Nysa Vineyard Pinot Noir is already garnering the attention of the critics.  As Jancis Robison noted  -  "quite a statement!"

The first wine offered from the 2022 vintage is our Audeant Rosé of Pinot Noir. As many of you have come to expect, the wine confounds expectations and is completely delicious. Texturally sanguine and lithe, living between the worlds of white wine and red, it bends genre. This iteration is a richer more densely fruited wine than the past two vintages, fans of the 2017 and 2018 are advised to stock up. 174 cases produced.

Fall release - SEPTEMBER, 2023

Our Fall offering consists of three wines from this vintage - yet another warm and vibrant iteration of our Seven Springs Chardonnay, a completely stunning Pinot Noir from Luminous Hills Vineyard, and a highly limited new bottling to the Audeant lineup, our Foothills Pinot Noir - two barrels shone throughout their elevage in twenty twenty-one with an interior light impossible to ignore, affording us an opportunity to produce this rare wine. One from Luminous Hills Vineyard and one from Cherry Grove Vineyard, each nestled into the forest hilltops of the foothills of Oregon Coast Range.

As communicated to our mailing list back in August, and in case you missed it, or are not on our mailing / allocation list - the group of our supporters has grown large enough to absorb the smallest of our various offerings, leaving not quite enough to share through tasting appointments or with our trade partners domestically and abroad - a problem we are grateful for.

It is our deepest desire that those of you who have been supporting us, and continue to wish to, are able to access the wines in cellar-able quantities to your hearts desire. To those ends we are moving towards an allocation model with our smallest production Pinot Noirs, Chardonnay and Rosé. We will endeavor to make this transition an easy one, however if you experience any challenges or if you have a wish list that includes greater quantity than the allocation you receive please do let us know and we will do our best to accommodate. Our Audeant Pinot Noir will remain available on the website for the foreseeable future as a wine that serves as a means to introduce your wine loving friends to the work we are doing. 

If you are not on our mailing list and wish to be a part of our future allocations, please join here.
-Teal & Andrew

2021 ROSé SPRING RELEASE - february 21, 2023

If you’ve ever tasted in the cellar with me from barrel, you’ll know there is a moment I cannot wait to get to. It reflects a similar moment during harvest, time for rosé. For me it is the reward for paying attention, seeing, smelling and feeling the juice translated into knowing its future as wine. It is a tipping point of extraction and fermentation where grape and microbiology have crossed the Rubicon, stepping from simple fruit into a vinous future as a completely uniquely expressed facet of Pinot Noir.

Each year the demand for this wine has drastically outstripped supply to the point where we scarcely have the wine in stock to be able to show it to those of you who visit us. As we sat to iron out our vineyard contracts for the vintage, Byron Dooley, owner of Luminous Hills vineyard offered us the chance to expand into any piece of the vineyard we chose. We had our eye on a little over a quarter acre at the highest point, with an aspect of East-Northeast. The gentlest ripening micro climate at an already cool site, ideal for the feathery level of extraction and bright acidity that we look for.

The wine is composed of two lots at Cherry Grove and Luminous Hills vineyards. Spending 5 and 6 days on the skins respectively, before the lightly fermenting juice was delicately separated and moved by gravity to barrel. Fermentation and elevage took place in large 300 liter barrels. The wine remained on the lees for 11 months before racking to tank for bottling, unfined and unfiltered.

We offer our 2021 Rosé, 144 cases were produced Purchase here

-Andrew

2020 Chardonnay- Fall Release

September 14, 2022

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

We quote Camus at the risk of being trite, it is as appropriate a sentiment as can be articulated about the 2020 vintage. Ash fell from an oppressive and opaque sky as we picked our seven rows of Chardonnay at Seven Springs vineyard. The realization that we wouldn’t be making any Pinot Noir in the vintage was hours old. There was only hope that the juice in these few golden berries could be spared the effects of the smoke and leave us with some small treasure from an otherwise disastrous vintage.

Our process needed inversion, grapes were pressed gently and the juice settled to avoid any extraction from the skins. The lees from our 2019 Chardonnay had been safely kept, as precious as they were, and added to the new wine that lacked much of its own solids. The result is a wine of amnesia and remembrance. A wine whose cruel winter has faded from memory and one that mirrors the beauty of its invincible summer.

We offer our 2020 Seven Springs Chardonnay, 105 cases of warm summer breezes and liquid electricity. Less than ten percent of our planned production, but a shimmering mineral beauty proudly offered. 
Purchase here

-Andrew

Rosé Vertical Release

April 27, 2022

In Audeant’s nascency, we were advised by mentors and friends to keep a larger library of our wines than is typical, an investment in future reference points for a vision we work to communicate daily. Each bottle of Audeant is a living, evolving entity, crafted to offer an expanding array of pleasure and intellectual intrigue as long as patience will allow. Today we dip into our library to offer thirty-six, three-pack verticals of our 2017, 2018 and 2019 rosé. Given the scarcity of this offering, it is only being made available to the members of our mailing list.

The rosé is our most limited bottling, selling out rapidly each release. Likely, most of you have visited in a window of time where we weren’t able to offer any for sale or even to taste. It is no exception to our mission of crafting age-worthy collectible wines. We are grateful to the fortunate few who will secure one of these three packs, for supporting our belief that serious rosé belongs in the most thoughtfully curated cellars in the world.

Below you will find a summary of the release notes from each of the vintages offered in this vertical, along with the philosophy surrounding this most idiosyncratic wine.

2017 Rosé of Pinot Noir
Cutting my teeth with friends and mentors in this valley through the years, we passionately consumed the most glorious rosé we could find. We knew there was more to this style of wine than the oceans of pink nonsense would lead one to believe and we strove to produce wines that belonged in the same breath as the handful of great rosés in the world.

I continue to believe it is a worthwhile pursuit, especially with Pinot Noir. The delicacy of its skins present the possibility for a most profoundly nuanced extraction. When this extraction is daily assessed for its exuberant aromas, textural presence and precision, one can find a myriad of beautiful rosé-esque expressions.

Our 2017 Audeant Rosé of Pinot Noir is a cuvee of two different lots. One barrel the result of a special trip to Carlisles Crest vineyard where we, along with a small team, picked clusters based entirely on the way they looked and felt on the vine, passing over the rest destined to be red wine. These clusters were pressed directly to barrel where the fermentation lasted two months and ageing continued on the lees for 10 months. The second lot was destemmed and was on its way to becoming fully red wine when after 6 days and on the cusp of the full activity of fermentation, the juice was drained off of the skins to a neutral French oak puncheon. Pinot Noir “arrested” as I like to call it. It’s a rosé that has the power and palate presence of a red wine with the mineral spine and freshness of a white wine. There is a beautiful harmony of ripe berries, fresh-cut herbs and citrus oil.
Only seventy two cases of this wine were produced.
Original Release Date: February 26, 2019

2018 Rosé of Pinot Noir
If you are unfamiliar with our past effort with rosé, I’ll quickly offer a window into the philosophy and process. Firstly, our goal is to transcend the traditional limits on what one might expect in a bottle of rosé. We aim to capture a uniquely faceted expression of Pinot Noir, lightly extracted through a short period of time on the skins, gently ushered to neutral French oak, and kept on the lees for ten months.

The result is a wine brimming with aromas bright fruit, flowers and mineral iron, not the bracing cut of your typical Oregon rose. There is more weight in the palate presence, indicative of the vintage. The beauty is in the contrast as the clarity, precision and minerality of a white wine shine through.
Just 58 cases produced.
Original Release Date: February 23, 2020

2019 Rosé of Pinot Noir
Our mission to render transcendental, kaleidoscopic and age-worthy rosé continues. Crystalline and precise, the wine straddles the aromas and flavors of a distant just-paler cousin of Pinot Noir, with the taught mineral energy of a white wine. There is one final constant of the wine, its extremely limited production. Previous vintages of the wine have long been sold out, a trend we expect to only hasten with this wine.
A mere sixty-five cases produced.
Original Release Date: March 9, 2021

Join our mailing list to ensure that you do not miss out on future release offerings!

-Teal & Andrew

2019 Vintage - Spring Release

March 2, 2022

“Everything necessary for beauty is here, if...” This felt like the only way to think about the 2019 vintage as our fruit, so diligently tended through the growing season, was pelted with rain after rain leading up to its eventual harvest. When we finally did bring our fruit in, standing over the bins, tasting grapes, calculating, peering into their uncertain vinous future, “Everything necessary for beauty is here, if…” If we cull damaged clusters on the vine and on the sorting table, if we thoughtfully tend each fermentation according to its needs, if we extract not everything from these berries, but everything necessary, and if we then patiently allow what could have been a vintage compromised at the last minute to show its radiance in barrel through elevage, if.

 We introduce you here to our final two wines from the 2019 vintage. Each representing a single site, the Nysa and Luminous Hills vineyards. If I were told in the midst of harvest that these would be my favorite wines I had made to date, and the highest rated, it is safe to say I would have been incredulous at best. But that is why they play the games so to speak, or leaning on the wisdom of one of my mentors, Jim Prosser, “Make the wine first”. This is to say, when the end or even a path to an end, cannot be seen, do the most thoughtful thing you can with what is in front of you. Then again, and again and so on. It wasn’t until the early summer 2020 that the wines began to reveal a shimmering, elusive kind of beauty. They were taught, edgy and light on their feet. Not so much friendly as winking, though growing more effusive by the day. Barrel by barrel they slowly became the wines we always want to make, the strength in delicacy, the power in tenderness. Clear, deep and resounding gustatory reflections of places grown and time they were made. “Everything necessary for beauty is here… right now, in these wines”.

Our 2019 Nysa precisely illustrates the type of depth and length they are capable of transmitting into wine regardless of vintage. Liltingly floral, ferrous earth, red cherry and game. Simultaneously intense and weightless. Classic Nysa, a more transparent vison into the place than any previous vintage. One hundred eighty-one cases produced.
Purchase here

The 2019 Luminous Hills, generally flamboyant, expresses itself in a no less reserved way, but its fruit is lithe wild strawberry laced with green peppercorn and stone, less tropical and more mountainous than previous vintages. Filigreed tannins stretch across the palate and melt away as currants, clove and blood orange drive a soaring finish. Two hundred eleven cases produced.
Purchase here

-Andrew

2019 Vintage - Fall Release

September 15, 2021

As usual we begin with deep gratitude; for your support of our work, that you sought us out, that you drink and share our wines with loved ones, and that you continue to follow along in our journey. Currently we find ourselves in the throes of our harvest season, seemingly un-ending days that physically and mentally tax, simultaneously keep the inner fires stoked.

Hope and gratitude feel so finely interwoven, and as is the lot of a good farmer, hope drives us to the tired end of each day where we sit with a glass, grateful to now have so much that was missed in twenty-twenty. Each vintage is a singular opportunity to be the conduit and lens that focuses light and water made fruit into the transcendent. A fortunate winemaker gets, maybe forty, of these opportunities to be fully engaged in this work. We lost our 2020 pinot noirs to wildfire smoke, though here, now, in the midst of our harvest season, eyes made clear our hearts are filled with gratitude for these nascent wines. To see so many of you as well this year, and to share our work has been a sustaining force for which we are incredibly thankful.

The two wines that bring us here today come from our Twenty-Nineteen vintage. In retrospect, it is a vintage we’d live on repeat. Though, in the midst of the rainy and just warm enough growing season, the challenges were immense. Perfect conditions for mildew required a doubling down on vigilance in the vineyard, and meticulous picking and sorting. Fermentation took place with native yeasts and extraction was slow and tempered.  It played out like the Oregon vintages past that put us on the map, and drew winemakers who sought the marginal ripening climate as a means to a purely classic end.

Our Twenty-Nineteen Audeant Pinot Noir is just such a classic throwback. Coastal forest thicket, bright red fruit streaming out in every direction at once, perched on a finely grained stony ferrous framework. A sub-13% alcohol tells a different story than the sappy staining palate and expansive finish seem to indicate. This is our favorite bottling of this wine to date. Four hundred seventy-six cases produced.
Purchase here

 Again from the seven rows, at Seven Springs vineyard, in Twenty-Nineteen we harvested the most beautiful Chardonnay that had ever crossed our threshold. We drew all we could from the just golden berries in the belief that what lay in those skins would provide the textural framework for a Chardonnay of astounding depth and resonance. We find struck match, spice and roasted nuts, lemon oil, dried flowers and flint, a core of fruit slowly unwinding. One hundred and forty-four cases produced.
Purchase here

- Andrew

2018 Vintage - Fall Release Part Deux

March 9, 2021

We have never been more excited to offer you a set of wines than these. The journey to get to this point has been filled with the joys of hard work and the aches of it as well, the shine of success and the hurt of failure. We all deserve a glass of something profound after the last twelve months. The success of our particular survival has been entirely due to your enthusiastic support of the work that we are doing, and for that we are profoundly grateful. In this spirit of gratitude we look back to a year of excitement and promise.

Two-thousand and eighteen was the year we first introduced ourselves to the world. It was our third vintage and offered the promise of singularly expressive Oregon Pinot Noir. It is a delight to be reminiscing upon this sun drenched growing season and how far we have come in the interim.

Two thousand eighteen was another in a string of warm, dry vintages. Without much ground moisture and buffeted by warm arid winds, the grapes developed thick dark skins as a natural protective mechanism. Their guardedness translated to a bounty of raw material with which to build radiant, powerful, age-worthy wines. The length of the season, extended by a mid-September rain and cool autumn nights combined to form an ideal home stretch into harvest. My particular joy in winemaking is seeing the fruit through the lenses of past experience and knowing (or hoping to know) the painstaking steps required to sculpt and mold this material into wines of simultaneous grace and power. Grapes arrived laden with all the potential fruit character one could want, detailed with pointed freshness and acidity. Stems were browning and lignified and were included in many fermentations, their winding channels preserving berries, lifting aromas and providing the necessary spaces for lightness to penetrate to the palate.

Our 2018 Audeant Pinot Noir is comprised of fruit from small lots, meticulously tended to by hand at Luminous Hills, Carlisle’s Crest, Nysa and Cherry Grove vineyards. Aromas unwind from the glass radiating with dark red fruit, cassis, black tea and herbs. In kind, the palate reverberates, extending out in all directions framed by the kind of structure that will carry this wine beautifully over its long potential ageing. We are currently recommending at least an hour in a decanter for this wine.
Just five hundred and sixty cases produced.
Purchase here

The 2018 Nysa Pinot Noir continues our history with this legendary site, producing wines of mind bending complexity, depth and finesse. Always requiring the most patience, one is rewarded with a cornucopia of scents and flavors across a spectrum of red fruits, pine, pipe tobacco and the “su bois” of the surrounding forest. Our small plot of 30 plus year old vines have reached an ideal maturity, needing little but a few gentle passes throughout the growing season to transmit their message of sunlight via place into your glass. Your maximum enjoyment achieved with a few hours in a decanter. Just one hundred and forty-seven cases produced.
Purchase here

These two Pinot Noirs have been resting in bottle now for twelve months, subsequent to their sixteen months of ageing in barrel. We remain committed to holding the wines in our cellar until they are ready for your enjoyment. No vintage in our now five-year history has demanded more patience.

Finally, our 2019 Rosé of Pinot Noir. We have detailed the unique process entailed in the production of this wine in past releases, curious minds can find those notes here. Our mission to render transcendental, kaleidoscopic and age-worthy rose continues. Crystalline and precise, the wine straddles the aromas and flavors of a distant just-paler cousin of Pinot Noir, with the taught mineral energy of a white wine. There is one final constant of the wine, its extremely limited production. Previous vintages of the wine have long been sold out, a trend we expect to only hasten with this wine. A mere sixty-five cases produced.

- Andrew

2018 Vintage - Fall Release

September 15, 2020

Undoubtedly, it is a tense world we are releasing these wines into. No problem, it is what they were born for. We like to think of tension as opposed to complacency. Tension demands attention, action, care, and thoughtfulness. Wines of tension offer energy, life, and dynamism. The surface brimming over the vessel, barely containing an outpouring of fruit, earth, and spice, all corralled by the framework of texture and acidity. We chose the vineyards that we work with based on this idea, that tension is necessary for greatness.
 
Arguably no other grape than Chardonnay illustrates this philosophy more acutely. Equally as arguably no other site in Oregon is more equipped to achieve this tension in Chardonnay than Seven Springs vineyard. We are remarkably fortunate to contract seven rows at this hallowed site, and 2018 marks the inaugural release of our Seven Springs Audeant Chardonnay. Just three barrels of this wine were made. The wine begins as an alpine meadow in bloom and moves into lemon meringue, and a stony-deep resonant finish.
 
The Pinot Noirs are representative of the sun filled days that marked the vintage, as always, buttressed by our diurnal shift, dropping evening temperatures and preserving acidity. This fall we introduce the first of the vintage, our 2018 Luminous Hills, always the earliest wine in the cellar to begin its aromatic unveiling.
 
2018 was just our second year working with Luminous Hills, and one could not ask for a better vintage to showcase what this vineyard is capable of. The site ripens the fruit more with light than heat. Stems lignify, flavors build and compound while the sharp bright acid remains. Our first ever 100% whole cluster fermentation was vinified in this vintage and it is showcased here as seventy percent of this blend, lifting the ample fruit and exotic aromatics into the stratosphere while richly weaving the structure of the wine together.
 
We, as usual, have chosen to hold these wines in our cellar for a minimum of six months from their bottling date. The aim is to mitigate the Christmas morning-like temptation to tear into them, they are delicately made and thus require a calming period to distance them from the shock of their new environs and to allow them to bloom in expression. Look for two additional two thousand eighteen Pinot Noirs in the Spring. Just as well, if not ideally, feel free to keep these wines in your own cellar for an extended period of time, as they will continue to soften and develop beautifully.
 
These two wines are now available for purchase.
 
Again, our 2018 Audeant and Nysa Pinot Noirs require an extended period of bottle age before we are comfortable introducing them to you, look out for their release in the Spring of 2021. In the interim, restock your cellars with what remains of our 2017s, find them here.

-Teal & Andrew

Case Purchase Virtual Tasting Offer:
In light of the difficulty a journey to come visit us currently presents, we are opening a virtual window into our cellar. To celebrate the new releases, with every mixed or matched case purchase, you will receive two invitations to join us for an intimate discussion by traveling digitally from the comfort of your home. We will explore the wines, the places they come from and our philosophy in growing them. Click here to learn more about this opportunity, sign up for a virtual tasting, or even schedule a private tasting of your own.

2018 Rosé - Spring Release

February 23, 2020

We are so pleased and grateful to be here again offering the result of our labors. We would not be, without your ever growing support. Twenty-twenty promises to be a momentous year for our small brand as we enter into our first handful of trade relationships in a select few states. While the word of the work we are doing slowly spreads and interest in the wines rises, the good and bad news is that the quantities produced have remained the same.

Such is the case with our 2018 Audeant Rosé, presented here today.

If you are unfamiliar with our past effort with rosé, I’ll quickly offer a window into the philosophy and process. Firstly, our goal is to transcend the traditional limits on what one might expect in a bottle of rosé. We aim to capture a uniquely faceted expression of Pinot Noir, lightly extracted through a short period of time on the skins, gently ushered to neutral French oak, and kept on the lees for ten months.

The result is a wine brimming with aromas bright fruit, flowers and mineral iron, not the bracing cut of your typical Oregon rose. There is more weight in the palate presence, indicative of the vintage. The beauty is in the contrast as the clarity, precision and minerality of a white wine shine through. Just 58 cases produced.

The wines are now available for purchase

A note on our release schedule: Look for the first of two 2018 pinot noirs in the fall, as well as our inaugural Seven Springs Chardonnay. Our wines are unfiltered, unfined, and moved as little as possible. The use of pumps is eschewed unless absolutely necessary, bottling is as extreme of a process as they go through, as such the wines are built for patience and we would like to put as much time in between bottling, and you popping a cork as possible. The 2018 vintage, still resting in barrel, will no doubt be served by this extra care.

In the meantime, a rapidly dwindling supply of our 2017 pinot noirs remain available here, get them before they are gone!

- Teal & Andrew

2017 Vintage - Fall Release

October 3, 2019

At Audeant we try to approach each task, taste, fermentation, each barrel, every vine with as much vulnerability as we can sustain. What this means in a given vineyard, vintage or moment in the cellar is the possibility to be absolutely crushed by our care for a thing and its failing to be as necessarily spectacular as the beauty we hope to translate to you. Every older vine stricken with phylloxera, clinging to the chance to ripen just one more cluster of grapes, each berry on the sorting table compromised by the ravenous starling or wasp, the barrel that doesn’t quite measure up to its brethren, our souls are shaken by how closely we are tethered to these wines and their journey. The cavity so carved from us through this tenderness, though, becomes the vessel to be filled and overfilled with such intense delight when diligent work and circumstances align.

Two thousand and seventeen was the vintage of alignment. Spring came later than many of its recently preceding vintages, and prolonged heat spikes were relatively rare throughout the summer. Day by day the vines blithely ripened their fruit with sunlight in lieu of intense heat, stoically weathering a brief period of stifling, wildfire-smoke filled skies. The vines coasted into a late September-early October harvest, nimbly dodging the rain typical of our autumn in Oregon.

We are offering two wines from this remarkable vintage here:

Our 2017 Audeant Pinot Noir is a meticulous barrel selection acutely relaying the story of the northern Willamette Valley in a season of wine-farming. Assembled barrels from Nysa, Luminous Hills, and Carlisle’s Crest vineyards present aromatically clear bright red fruit, bramble and warm toasted spice. On the palate tart juicy red raspberry fruit, like the hard candy on your grandmother’s coffee table, buoy the fine tannin, black tea and persistent finish. Just 435 cases produced.

The 2017 Nysa Vineyard Pinot Noir comes from 30 year old, own rooted vines, in the heart of the Dundee Hills AVA. Similarly red fruited but more classic Dundee cherry, soaringly floral aromatics of blood orange and iron rich soil. The wine has more of everything, acid, fruit, earth, and spice while remaining improbably light on its feet. The wine is intense, but intensely lovely. Only 190 cases produced.

It would be foolish to hope for another vintage like 2017 to come along, nothing is ever the same again, even if it was, it wouldn’t be, and there is a stirring joy to the abandonment of oneself to the newness of each successive growing season. A vintage in our future, though, will align in a new way, it will quicken our hearts and through attentive work, hopefully yours as well, as the wines here offered undoubtedly will. The wines are now available for purchase.

In addition to this offering a small quantity of our previous releases may be available through special request, do not hesitate to reach out. Please contact us at info@audeantwines.com with any questions, your state is not listed or you have additional requests.

Thank you for your continued support,

- Teal & Andrew

2017 Vintage - Spring Release

February 26, 2019

We greet you all again with the utmost gratitude. Your generous responses to our initial offering were beyond our expectations. It is this thoughtful reception, the stories of sharing with family and friends, or even just a picture of our bottle on a table, that keep our fires lit and bring us to the vines and barrels each day with a renewed focus and vigor.

Unlikely as it may feel at the moment, spring is near and the warmer weather means shipping routes will be opening soon. Maybe you are new to the list, or didn’t get your order in on time, even if you opened more bottles than you had planned (it is really not hard to do, we attest), there are still small amounts of 16s stashed and available for you.

To the point at hand. We have two new beauties in our menagerie from the 2017 vintage. For the sake of brevity, I’ll postpone an introduction to the vintage until our fall release in lieu of introductions to a vineyard and a philosophy.

I spent the winter of 2011-2012 pruning vines, mostly alone, at various vineyards in the Willamette Valley. One such day found me sloughing through fluffy wet flakes of snow perched high in the foothills of Oregon’s coast range. The view afforded was spectacular, the cloud above me was dense, dark and steadily productive, though the rest of the valley I could see was green and drenched in that special kind of winter sunlight. It was a perfect Oregon day.

It was Luminous Hills vineyard and it is certainly apart, higher elevation (900 ft!) than tradition would recommend and its steep hills require a most skilled tractor driver. When six years later they for the first time decided to make fruit available from a small portion of the vineyard, this memory propelled us to the front of the line.

Our 2017 Audeant Luminous Hills Vineyard is limpid and abundantly aromatic. Clean and purely driven as the rain that we hurriedly shielded the fruit from with tarps as we picked. It has the framework of tannin and acid that lend to long life in the bottle, with an overflowing core of red and blue fruit, belying its combination of ancient sedimentary and volcanic soils. We produced 8 barrels of this wine, equaling two hundred and thirty cases.

Cutting my teeth with friends and mentors in this valley through the years, we passionately consumed the most glorious rosé we could find. We knew there was more to this style of wine than the oceans of pink nonsense would lead one to believe and we strove to produce wines that belonged in the same breath as the handful of great rosés in the world.

I continue to believe it is a worthwhile pursuit, especially with Pinot Noir. The delicacy of its skins present the possibility for a most profoundly nuanced extraction. When this extraction is daily assessed for its exuberant aromas, textural presence and precision, one can find a myriad of beautiful rosé-esque expressions.

Our 2017 Audeant Rosé of Pinot Noir is a cuvee of two different lots. One barrel the result of a special trip to Carlisles Crest vineyard where we, along with a small team, picked clusters based entirely on the way they looked and felt on the vine, passing over the rest destined to be red wine. These clusters were pressed directly to barrel where the fermentation lasted two months and ageing continued on the lees for 10 months. The second lot was destemmed and was on its way to becoming fully red wine when after 6 days and on the cusp of the full activity of fermentation, the juice was drained off of the skins to a neutral French oak puncheon. Pinot Noir “arrested” as I like to call it. It’s a rosé that has the power and palate presence of a red wine with the mineral spine and freshness of a white wine. There is a beautiful harmony of ripe berries, fresh-cut herbs and citrus oil. Only seventy two cases of this wine were produced.

The wines are now available for purchase. Please reach out to us at info@audeantwines.com with any questions, your state is not listed or you have additional requests. Large and small formats are also available in finite quantities. Our team will coordinate shipping with you with an eye on the temperatures en route.

We expect Ground Shipping routes to open up within the first two weeks of April once extreme temperatures subside. Look for our 2017 Audeant and Nysa Vineyard Pinot Noir Release in the Fall.

With great appreciation,

- Teal & Andrew

2016 Inaugural Release

November 6, 2018

First of all, we would like to say thank you. Thank you for reading this email; thank you for being a part of our story, and thank you for daring to walk with us in the pursuit of our dreams.

Having just completed our third vintage, our hands still stained by its fruit, some clarity is offered looking back. Two thousand and sixteen as a growing season is defined by its early spring and a warm, even summer. The autumn began without a cloud in sight and slightly cooler temperatures carried us into harvest. The wines are densely packed but not without a pulsing vibrancy. We source our fruit for vintages exactly like this one; where higher elevations and later ripening vineyards hope to harness every burnished ray of Oregon sun. The results of those small, intensely aromatic fermentations are now available in the form of two wines.

Our 2016 Audeant Pinot Noir revealed itself to us over the course of its élevage, as truly a vinous extension of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Tasting a barrel we’d say to ourselves, “well that smells like Oregon.” What seems like it should be true, is often profoundly exciting when it is. Clear, rain-fed streams filtered through mossy thickets of bramble and life-filled earth. Soaking and lingering red fruit buoyed with the sappy green frame of its stems. Firm, dense and a bit brooding as the vintage dictated, but full of the energy and joy that was poured over it during its life in our cellar. Poised and ever-expanding, its best days are ahead of it. There are a mere two hundred and seventy-nine cases of this wine.

Produced in even smaller quantities is our 2016 Nysa vineyard Pinot Noir. The vines here are 30 years old, producing tiny clusters of beautiful fruit. It is humbling to walk the rows where the signs on the end posts still hang like a trophy room of Oregon’s winemaking history: Bethel Heights, Panther Creek, Ken Wright, Bergstrom, Antica Terra. We are honored to write our own chapter into the history of this place. Our Nysa Pinot Noir is surging with aromatics of black cherry, hard candy, warm spices and the exhalations of ancient decomposed volcanoes, all humming along a frame of expansive limpid tannin. The wine is dense and tightly coiled. Open for a few hours or a whole day and it sings, boding well for a long life of development in bottle. One hundred and thirty-seven cases produced.

The wines are now available for purchase here. Allocations are limited to ensure that we can get the wines in the hands of those who want them. If you would like to receive a larger allocation, please reach out to us at info@audeantwines.com and we will try to accommodate your request. Large format bottles are also available in finite quantities.

Our small team will coordinate shipping with you with an eye on the temperatures en route.

With great appreciation,

- Teal & Andrew