Jess Miller is a bad ass.
She’s tended the vines at Clos Roche Blanche in Touraine with the new proprietor Julien Pineau. While working with Alice and Olivier de Moor in the vineyards, Jess was lent a copy of one of their favorite pruning guides. She decided it was awesome. Then, with a no-big-deal demeanor, she decided she should translate it from the French. Then, with the same nonchalance, she got a book deal. The damn thing will be published by Board and Bench this spring (2018).
Like I said, Jess Miller is a bad ass.
All the while Jess makes her living as a vineyard manager. She farms twelve acres in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA in Oregon. This is probably self-evident by now, but it’s also worth noting: Jess is actually a vigneron. Which is to say she spends her days working with plants, in a vineyard.
But she’s more than that. Jess is that type of vigneron-dirty-fingernailed-
So while the days are spent thinking about the lives and souls of plants, in exchange for her labors, Jess is also given a little bit of fruit (about a ton), all sourced from a half-acre organically farmed parcel of Pinot Noir in Eola-Amity Hills.
For this, her first vintage, Jess made exactly four 225-liter barrels of wine. Even in our absurd world of micro-winemaking, Jess makes very little wine.
Yet, the wines are something of a revelation (funny that, is there a relationship here? Small grower, great wines?). Both of the Pinots have that deep, dark-fruited textural thing that has made Oregon so famous. But, they seem to have calmed down all the plushness and given it a bouncy, airy, defined edges, an uncommon energy and a subtlety that is as loud as silence.
Blah, blah blah, it’s all nonsense – taste the wines. More than one person has called her pet-nat rosé one of the absolute best in America. The Pinot Noir, a smaller fish in a much bigger pool, is as distinguished.
