Antica Terra Pinot Noir Alder Creek 2019

You won't find reviews for this wine on Vivino or Wine.com, because we bought the entire lot. It isn’t available anywhere else in the world. Only 60 bottles were produced, and it’s freakin’ delicious, with serious aging potential to boot. Each bottle is numbered and signed by the winemaker.

And while these are fun facts, it's also true that the wine was made by one of our favorite producers, Maggie Harrison, a peerless winemaker who crafts some of the rarest and most sought after wines made in the Willamette Valley (Oregon).

2019 PINOT NOIR
LOT 57

ALDER CREEK VINEYARD | ANTICA TERRA
APPELLATION: EOLA-AMITY HILLS
WINEMAKER: MAGGIE HARRISON
HARVEST DATES: OCTOBER 3–5, 2019
BOTTLING: APRIL 27, 2021
ALCOHOL: 12.7%
PRODUCTION: 60 BOTTLES / 5 CASES

THE WINE

This singular selection represents the Antica Terra Vineyard in its purest form. Our inspiration came from Burgundy, where small producers would have often only one barrel from a small plot of Grand Cru vines and couldn’t bear to top it up with village-level wine. They would drop small rocks into the barrel to displace the wine and eliminate the headspace. We waded through Alder Creek and picked buckets of rocks from the clear, newly-melted glacial runoff. This barrel was topped with these rocks and thus remains the only wine made purely and wholly from our estate.

THE WINERY

Antica Terra is an 11-acre vineyard located on a rocky hillside in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA. The first vines were planted here in 1989 in a clearing within the oak savannah. The geology of the site is extremely unusual; in this place, the remains of a far older prehistoric seabed rise to the surface, leaving the vines to struggle, without topsoil, amongst a fractured mixture of sandstone sown with fossilized oyster shells.