2015 Pinot Noir Ange

This sulfur-free, unfiltered Pinot Noir fermented with stems and whole berries for 10 days, then spent close to 10 months in amphora and had just been bottled when I tasted it in late July 2016. Pit-inflected, mineral-salt-laced fresh sour cherry delivers a refreshingly juicy, invigoratingly tart and piquant performance. With barely a hint of tannin, the feel here is attractively polished and the finish lively, buoyant and mouthwatering. Like most of his experiments, Niger is convinced that this has years ahead of it in bottle, but there’s no way of telling, and I would certainly follow its evolution warily. (A more aggressively fermented and longer-aged 2013 Pinot Noir called “Dominus” was aromatically interesting but disappointingly drying and astringent.)