Argyle 2000 Brut Sparkling Wine Willamette Valley

Perhaps the most exciting vintage for sparkling wine yet from Argyle! The aromas are a wonderful ebb and flow of fruit and mineral. Look for an immediate hit of peach with apricot fruit that flows into double baked wheat cracker yeast, then on into pear tart—vanilla crème. The flavor is multi-tiered and extraordinarily long. Apricot and pear fruit with a toasted yeast edge are balanced atop a crisp, mineral structure. It’s this marriage of fruit, bottle age, and mineral, which lend this Brut its creamy texture (especially with food!).

Let me be blunt: Arglye 2000 Brut is better than the majority of French Champagnes you'll find on the shelves -- at half the price or less. How can this be? Simple. It has been aged on its flavor-enhancing lees or sediment in the bottle (which gets disgorged only upon release) for four years. Most French Champagnes are given only half that amount of aging.

Of course, where the grapes are grown counts -- and the kind of grapes, too. Here again, the varieties are just the ones you want: a blend of chardonnay (55 percent) and pinot noir (45 percent). These are the two varieties, along with pinot meunier, employed in France's Champagne region.

As for where the grapes are grown, it's true that the Champagne region has a remarkable soil (chalk) and can create superlative grapes. At its best, Champagne is still the benchmark. The problem is that only rarely -- and usually very expensively -- is Champagne at its best. Too often, vineyard yields are excessively high, resulting in grapes that lack flavor and character.

Oregon, on the other hand, is not subject to the same ferocious, soul-killing market demand as Champagne. Yields are lower here. The climate is also right: Coolness is all for sparkling wine. (It sure would be nice if we had some chalk, though.)

All this adds up to one thing: The just-released Arglye 2000 Brut is one of America's finest sparkling wines, bar none. And it's assuredly superior to many French Champagnes. It shows the finesse expected of a good sparkling wine allied to a creamy-textured density, with a flavor complexity that comes from first-rate pinot noir and chardonnay treated to equally first-rate winemaking.

Buy it on-line at Wine.Com for only $19.99

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