Wine & Spirits - April 2018 - 50

WINE & SPIRITS

career at Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, then at Rubicon
in San Francisco, joined the Evening Land team after
Lafon, in 2010. As president and general manager,
he began negotiating a deal to purchase the adjacent property from the Janzen family. They were
still in discussions when Stone and Tarlov left Evening Land in early 2012, each going his own way.
Stone had taken a job in Napa Valley when the Jenzens approached him, later that same year. Though
they'd been reluctant to sell what had been a wedding
present, their circumstances had changed. Stone had
a small nest egg from the sale of his Sirita project
in California and, determined to buy the land, he
auctioned off his personal wine cellar and convinced
some family members to invest.
It wasn't until after Stone and his team cleared the
plum, cherry and Christmas trees and planted the
hillside that Lafon left Evening Land and came to
work at Lingua Franca, Stone's new project, in February 2015. Thomas Savre, the Dijon-trained assistant
winemaker at Evening Land, joined a few weeks later.
Two years on, Stone still looked a little shell-shocked
when I met him outside his new winery, at the base
of the hillside he had recently planted to vines. The
LSV Vineyard rises up toward Seven Springs, with a
view to La Source. To farm the vines, Stone brought
on Mimi Casteel, who grew up in the vineyards at
Bethel Heights and now tends her own vines nearby.
Casteel is the viticulturist for Lingua Franca, bringing
her personal take on biodynamic farming to the site.
Stone led me inside to meet Savre, who helped
design the winery along with Lafon, and who now
makes the wines. The building felt cavernous, and

APRIL 2018

Several miles south, a different international team at
Chapter 24 has been discussing how to replant the Witness Tree Vineyard, a famed property laid low by phylloxera. It's on an east-facing slope adjacent to Cristom, with a view of Jessie's Vineyard at the top of
the hill. Chapter 24 is Tarlov's latest venture, which
also owns and farms the Black Walnut Vineyard in
Dundee, purchases fruit from 15 growers and continues to search for land.
After what Tarlov describes as the coup d'etat at
Evening Land, he contacted Burgundy shipper Becky
Wasserman in search of a vigneron to consult with
him on a new project. She put him in touch with
Louis Michel Liger-Belair, the Burgundy count who
studied oenology and pushed the reset on his family's
legendary domaine, which includes La Romanée, the

photo by Andrea Johnson photography

Larry Stone, MS,
proprietor, (left), and
winemaker Thomas Savre
of Lingua Franca,
in the LSV Vineyard.

Stone explained that his team was handling some
custom crush projects while the LSV vines were
maturing. They were also buying fruit from several
growers, blending it into a range of wines from 2015.
"We were trying to build as few cuvées as possible,"
Stone explained, "but we ended up with two whites
and five reds."
It happened that certain wines fit together and
others did not. Lafon and Savre blended the 2015
Avni from a collection of seven vineyards, six of
them east-facing sites on the same slope as LSV, all
within a couple miles of the winery. The 2015 Tongue
'n Cheek comes from two vineyards farther north,
Elton and Les Stevens, that gave a fuller, richer,
darker wine that shows more bass notes and spice
in its delicate strawberry flavors. "If you put Tongue
'n Cheek and Avni together, they fight each other,"
Stone says. There is a sensibility to the blending that
goes beyond what might make technical sense. Stone
describes it as "exploring Oregon with the mind of
Burgundy."
Mimi's Mind may be Lingua Franca's most intriguing example of Burgundy-and-Oregon brainpower.
Casteel grows the fruit at her Hope Well Vineyard in
Salem, bringing her work as a botanist, forester and
ecologist to bear on her farming. Lafon and Savre
bring an outside perspective: "In America, people
want to extract," says Stone. "The French don't want
extraction."
Perhaps due to Casteel's farming, and perhaps
with an assist from Lafon and Savre's gentle extraction, Mimi's Mind is the most delicate and grounded
of the Lingua Franca 2015s, with the scent of meadow
flowers, and tannins that lend the wine depth and
detail.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - April 2018