2007 Buty Winery Columbia Rediviva Phinny Hill Vineyard

The berries that informed his Cabernet-Syrah 2007 Columbia Rediviva Phinny Hill Vineyard were so tiny, notes Foster, that extraction proceeded much more quickly than usual and he pressed within 12 days, letting the fermentation finish in barrel. One certainly seems to taste that tiny-berry concentration. Bitter-edged cassis, huckleberry, and seedy black raspberry; green herbs; sprouting lentil; and walnut inform a firm, finely-tannic palate and this finishes with a remarkable sense of focus, energy and lift for a tannic wine of its two cepages, not to mention of 14.5% alcohol. Suggestions of stone and iodine add to the complexity on display here, though, interestingly, – as with the other installments of this cuvee I tasted – the Syrah doesn’t display any of its animal side. Like its 2007 counterpart, this became more intriguing as it opened to air. I see no reason not to anticipate at least another 4-5 years of fascination. Buty is the project, begun in 2000, of Zelma Long protegee and veteran Washington winemaker Caleb Foster with his wife Nina Buty Foster. While their only public facility is located in Walla Walla and they recently bottled the first wine from their estate on the famously cobbled nearby soils of Milton-Freewater (a project on which Foster’s viticultural go-to guy, Phil Freese, consulted), most of their fruit is sourced from farther west, for red wine notably from the Beightol family’s impressive and manifestly impeccably-farmed Phinny Hill Vineyard whose slopes overlook the immediately adjacent and much more famous Champoux Vineyard that Dick Beightol helped plant and managed in its years as part of the surrounding Mercer Ranch. Foster, incidentally, reports very seldom adding tartaric acid to any of his musts, white or red; yet brightness and juiciness characterize most of the wines I tasted on my first visit with him. For reds – portions of which ferment in wooden uprights – he utilizes various means of extraction, including air-injection. Beast represents a parallel label to Buty (hence the prefacing of those wines descriptions with “Beast;” but reference to Buty does not appear on their labels.). Tel. (509) 527-0901