In This Newsletter:
Markus Molitor

Markus Molitor: Do I Detect delicious?

Do I detect delicious? This is the first question one must ask themselves upon examining any wine of any supposed caliber. Sometimes we can just make ourselves dizzy focusing on the technical verbiage associated with a drink that’s meant to give pleasure. Are those terpenes I’m picking up? I’ll swear on my life there’s some grapefruit pith in there. Anyone else have a headache?

Outside of the obsession with tasting note creativity, an epidemic afflicting the wine consuming community is the fixation on dry wine virtue signaling. Oh, how many times I’ve heard a restaurant guest or customer proclaim that they “only drink dry wines.” This type of statement is usually following by said individual picking up or ordering a zinfandel or cabernet-based wine with copious residual sugar.… Read the rest

Sequitur

Mike Etzel, the founder and winemaker of Sequitur, is a living legend in the Willamette Valley. He co-founded Beaux Frères in the late 1980s and was the winemaker there until recently handing off the duties to his son. Never one to rest on his laurels, he began planting a vineyard adjacent to Beaux Frères in 2010—a project that became what we know as Sequitur.

It’s helpful to think of Sequitur as a distillation of everything Mike Etzel learned from Beaux Frères over the decades. The Sequitur vineyard sits right next to the Beaux Frères “Upper Terrace” but is planted to a wider array of clones at tighter spacing. It’s been farmed biodynamically since the beginning and is sheltered with Douglas Fir—in short, it’s the fully realized vision of a man who’s helped define Willamette Valley Pinot Noir.… Read the rest