One of the jewels of the Willamette Valley, featured today in Oregon Wine Month, Big Table Farm has been nothing short of a massive success since first starting more than a decade ago. I was blown away when I first tasted these wines many years back. They are wines that show incredible range and texture. Superstar winemaker Brian Marcy has a longstanding history in the wine industry, living in Napa and previously serving as winemaker for Neyers prior to moving north and settling in the Willamette Valley. His wines are rich, terroir driven and show dazzling minerality. It is very hard to find this degree of tension and viscosity in a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir. Years ago I admired the wines he was crafting at Neyers and I even recently had the chance to try one of his older wines, a Chardonnay that was more than a decade old but was still holding well!
I adored the new releases were stunning across the board. I absolutely loved the new 2020 Big Table Farm ‘Laughing Pig’ Rose (OB, 92) which is one of the great Oregon Rose wines I have tasted so far this year. Even better is the scintillating 2019 Big Table Farm ‘Earth’ Pinot Noir (OB, 95) which is a barrel select wine that is downright thrilling and is one of the great wines produced this vintage. Learn more about Big Table Farm at http://www.bigtablefarm.com/ Here are the fantastic new release wines by Big Table Farm.
2020 Big Table Farm ‘Laughing Pig’ Rose- Big Table Farm have earned a reputation for consistently producing some of the best Rose that you’ll find in the Pacific Northwest over the past several years. This edition is a direct-press wine that had a long ferment and then saw all neutral oak barrel aging prior to bottling. Silky and smooth on the mid-palate, the wine shows off gorgeous red fruits that dance with orange rind, cinnamon and cloves. This finishes exceedingly long. Drink 2021-2027- 92
2019 Big Table Farm ‘The Elusive Queen’ Chardonnay- The 2019 Big Table Farm ‘The Elusive Queen’ Chardonnay is a gorgeous barrel select wine sourced from a host of Willamette Valley vineyards. Soft, refined and beautifully textured, this shows off layers of lemon oil, cardamom dusted Challah bread, kumquat and green apple flavors, alongside a brisk sense of minerality. The texture here is simply astounding. Gorgeous to savor in its youth, the 2019 ‘The Elusive Queen’ will cellar well for more than a decade to come. Drink 2021-2035- 95
2019 Big Table Farm ‘Earth’ Pinot Noir- The 2019 ‘Earth’ Pinot Noir is one of the great wines that I have tasted from this vintage thus far. This limited production bottling is a barrel selection that Brian Marcy and Clare Carver select to he their finest expressions of Pinot Noir. Really needing about an hour in the decanter to be fully expressive, the 2019 ‘Earth’ unveils red cherry candy and pomegranate seed tones alongside guava and damp earthy undertones on this evocative bouquet. The palate is soft, concentrated and very savory. Layers of ripe red fruits collide with wild mushroom, blood orange zest, beef blood and salted charcuterie. The savory aspects of the wine are particularly appealing, as this gorgeous new Pinot Noir will provide plenty of drinking enjoyment over the next fifteen to twenty years. Drink 2021-2036- 95