Nicolas Jay Winery
Yamhill-Carlton, Willamette Valley, Oregon
Nicolas-Jay Winery
I met Jean-Nicolas Méo for the first time at a pre-sale tasting at Christie's. Anthony Hanson MW, my boss, made the introduction. I knew from working with the wine his extraordinary training with his family including his uncle, the legendary Henri Jayer, whose wine has the purity and expression that few have ever repeated.
Two years later I was alone with him, setting up a private tasting as the senior specialist. No Anthony in the room. Just me, the bottles, and Jean-Nicolas watching me work opening and make sure the bottles were correct. There were four bottles of his 1996 Vosne-Romanée Aux Brûlées, and one was slightly off from the other three, not dramatically, but enough that I knew it was there. I sat with that for a moment and then I told him.
The second before I said it was pure panic. The second after, when he nodded and reached for a bucket, was relief of a kind I have rarely felt in a professional setting. He decanted all four bottles into it, waited, then poured the wine back evenly and we retasted. They were the same. Jean-Nicolas did not explain himself or offer a theory. He simply solved the problem and we continued. I have spent my entire career in rooms with serious winemakers. I have never seen anyone else think to do that. It is the instinct of someone who trusts the wine completely and has no interest in being right about the vessel.
That moment is the foundation of everything that follows.
When I later learned that Jean-Nicolas had partnered with Jay Boberg to make wine in Oregon, I did not need a critic to tell me to pay attention. I began championing Nicolas-Jay in my beverage programs before most people in America knew the label. The reasoning was not complicated. You either understood what Jean-Nicolas brought to a vineyard and a wine or you did not.
Jay Boberg is not a peripheral figure in American music. He co-founded IRS Records, later became President of MCA Universal, and signed REM, The Go-Go's, Blink-182, Mary J. Blige, Sublime, The Roots, and B.B. King among others. His path to Jean-Nicolas was characteristic of how he operates. As a frequent visitor to Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Jay became friends with Kermit Lynch, whose wine shop around the corner introduced American audiences to the great domaines of Burgundy. Those visits led Jay to Burgundy, and those visits to Burgundy led him to Jean-Nicolas. By the time they decided to make wine together in Oregon, the friendship was already decades old and the shared understanding of what serious Pinot Noir required was not a conversation they needed to have.
A few years ago Jay invited me to Oregon Pinot Camp. I stayed at his home in the Willamette Valley alongside Jon Leopold, Wine Director of The Alinea Group in Chicago. We spent our days at wineries all over the valley as well as our evenings at the house. Jean-Nicolas was not there. But his presence was in every glass Jay opened.
One evening Jay told us how the partnership began. The Chez Panisse visits, Kermit Lynch, the first trips to Burgundy, the friendship that grew from those visits into something that eventually found its way to a hillside in Yamhill-Carlton. He told the story the way people tell stories about things that changed the direction of their lives, unhurried and specific. Outside the valley was dark and the wine was exceptional and nobody was in any hurry to be anywhere else.
Jean-Nicolas and Jay spent 2012 and 2013 visiting over two hundred vineyard sites before settling on Bishop Creek in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA, an ungrafted vineyard planted in the late 1980s that produced something neither of them had encountered anywhere else in the valley. They built the winery into the hillside for gravity flow. The first vintage released in 2014. What Jean-Nicolas brought to Oregon was not a style. It was a standard. The same precision that shapes every decision at Méo-Camuzet now governs Nicolas-Jay from sorting to elevage. The wines are not Burgundy. They are not trying to be. They are Oregon Pinot Noir made by someone who knows precisely what restraint and site expression require, and who has spent thirty years proving it.
From the Cellar
The Nicolas-Jay L'Ensemble is drawn from ten vineyard sites across the Willamette Valley and hand-selected by Jean-Nicolas from barrel each vintage. It is a blend in the true Burgundian sense, a synthesis of the best of what the valley produced that year rather than a compromise between sites. Red fruit, fine-grained tannins, a mineral spine that keeps everything honest. It is the wine to start with if you want to understand what this project is.
The Nicolas-Jay Bishop Creek is the estate wine from that original ungrafted Yamhill-Carlton site. Tighter and more structured than the L'Ensemble, with a savory depth that comes from older vines and a specific piece of ground that stopped two very experienced people in their tracks in 2013. It needs time and rewards it considerably.
The 1996 Méo-Camuzet Vosne-Romanée Aux Brûlées is the bottle from that Christie's tasting room. A Premier Cru from the northern end of Vosne-Romanée, sitting just above Richebourg on a slope that produces wines of generous texture and complex Vosne spice. The 1996 vintage was one of the most structured of the decade in Burgundy, and those four bottles, redistributed through a bucket by the man who made them, remain among the most instructive things I have ever tasted. Understanding that wine, and the decision Jean-Nicolas made in that room, is the key to understanding everything Nicolas-Jay is trying to do three thousand miles away in Oregon.